Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

This is my first encounter with the work of John Ash, probably because I have been put off from reading him by being told that he was a disciple of close namesake John Ashbery and for my money one John Ashbury is one too many. However, on the evidence of Ash’s new volume there are few signs of Ashbery’s camp silliness and deliberate incoherence and non-sequitur.

     The Anatolikon contains a group of poems all dealing with aspects of life in Turkey where the poet has spent some time and these effectively evoke the otherness of an alien culture and its ambience as it becomes more familiar yet always retains the mystery and allure of the exotic. The free verse is often pleasingly dithyrambic but the rhythms paradoxically lack the possibility of variety within uniformity that exists in the best metrically patterned verse and it tends to become a bit monotonous.

     To The City is divided into three parts, the first presenting more personal and slightly self-aggrandising pieces and here we do find a touch of Ashberry-like facetiae but in Parts II and III there is a strengthening and deepening of insight and expression and ‘Beds’, for instance, is truly a triumph of wit, imagination and economy of means and ‘To Music’, written in the same aphoristic style, is equally successful. In poems like ‘My Life’, ‘The Next Whisky Bar’ and ‘Falling’ we are given enough information for the poems to grip and hold the attention and if the explicit details of fact and circumstances are withheld it is not from an Ashbery-like desire to tease the reader but because they are hidden from the poet himself in the impenetrable and resonant mystery of human existence. John Ash has written many poems here that I know I shall return to.