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

We know what to expect from Vernon Scannell: life’s little and big ironies in polished stanzas and complicated verse-forms, and this is Scannell at his best.

     Appearances are deceptive: an old friend has not been converted to Christianity: he’s been following a pair of lovely legs to church.

...Each Sunday, breathing pious air,
He had never felt more hopelessly alone,
And gazing at her aureate head would groan
Beneath the heavy sadness of desire,
Learn nothing that he had not always known.

The last line is not a criticism: life has only new versions of the same old stories to offer. It offers pain: the pain of love turned to hatred - love that is hatred because it’s enduring and is in fact paradoxically love itself. The Juliets and Rosalinds are wearing wrinkled masks, and Romeo looks like “that mad old King Lear”. The new beautiful girls are only available in sleep. Still, one lives in hope of love, even if faith is absent. The woman who left her knickers and a red shoe on the golf course might be found.

     As one walks down cemetery road, it’s the GP not the telly doctor or the doctor of divinity one turns to. The exaggerations of the screen mock our reality. When we punched someone it hurt our fist. The same park holds A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the sleeping alcoholic in his smell. But times are changing: the knife and gun are coming off the screen into the street. There are empathetic evocations of sitting in the electric chair or awaiting the firing squad. Aquinas advises “Live each day as if it were your last.”

Your last? Live every single day in stark
And gibbering terror of the coming dark?
                                                        No way.

     This tragic vision is handled with a deft lightness of touch, the understatement and humour of the old soldier. Games with words transform reality into art and make it endurable. Tracing the ambiguities of ‘good’ is a nice irony, and a mislaid hearing aid evokes wondrous fantasies:

‘Leopards pray’,
the surpliced voice intoned
from the Sunday morning radio.

Were Hopkins’s ‘terrible sonnets’ really terrible? a student asks. How come he got to publish them then?

     An out-of-fashion coat bequeathed by an uncle turned out to be in fashion. For a Beat poet in Charlotte Street, who made a generous offer, it was just the thing. Scannell thinks of his “old clothes” but need not fear being out of fashion. Intelligence never is - or comes back - and Scannell seems as likely to have staying power as that other old unbeliever, Hardy.