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

SOUTH poets who took part in theabove reading at Winchester Cathedralon July 19, 2003, can be in little doubt that as well as being a highly successful and at times moving occasion in its own
right, it was also an important milestone in the magazine’s history.

The high hopes with which SOUTH was launched in 1990, with a reading at the same Cathedral, gave way last autumn to concern about its continued survival. The response to our appeal showed the clear wishes of its admirers— and in just over six months, we recruited 80 Foundation Members, who continue to form the backbone of the rescue effort.

Winchester showed something more: not just the support, but the affection that many people have for SOUTH. Individual readings also evinced what it has quietly done, over the last dozen years or so, to further the development of several poets.

This latter point was made by Stella Davis, who has been a contributor since its earliest days; and who, as poet in residence at the Cathedral, was kind enough to arrange not only the reading,
but for the proceeds from an impressively large audience to be donated to SOUTH’s appeal.

With supporters like these, the magazine must surely be able to weather its current crisis. With more new Foundation Members and subscribers, its future— and its continued independence— could be assured.

The warmth of these responses is greatly appreciated by SOUTH’s management team. We could hardly ask current supporters for more: but the situation still remains that more supporters are needed.

F T Prince

As SOUTH was going to press the death was announced of F T Prince, one of not only the region’s, but the nation’s, most respected and undervalued poets. Born in South Africa in 1912, and educated
at Oxford and Princeton, he came to the notice of T S Eliot, and Faber published his first book when he was only 26. It was sixteen years before his next collection appeared. It included Soldiers Bathing, one of the second world war’s most famous poems. During the war he served as an intelligence officer at Bletchley Park and in the Middle East. He was professor of English at Southampton University from 1957 until his retirement in 1974.

Though he was honoured by the British academic establishment, and his poetry was admired by a widely contrasting cross–section of individual poets, Prince neither pursued nor received the recognition he deserved, and much of his later work was published by a variety of small presses. In 1993 Carcanet published his second Collected Poems; and in 2002, his 90th birthday was celebrated in a special edition of PN Review.

Prince’s poetry has been admired for its complex beauty and enigmatic power. He told one of his publishers: “The ability to go on writing from time to time has to be paid for instantly by instalments of anxiety or misery.” Typical of his unassuming approach to his own gifts was another comment: “Poets should keep their mouths shut – except in their poetry; if that is any good, nothing else matters.”

Féile Filíochta

international poetry competition, now in its fifteenth year, is claimed to be the biggest and brightest in Europe, with a prize fund of €12,300 from Dun Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council, and extra prizes from cultural organisations and embassies. Entries are invited in nine European languages for the adult and under–17 categories, with an under–12 category for poems in Irish and English. No entry fees. More details from PO Box 6983, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, or from www.dlrcoco.ie/library. Closing date is October 11, 2003.