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

Michael Hofmann, Nights in the Iron Hotel, Faber, £4
Julie O'Callaghan, Edible Anecdotes, Dolmen, £4
Matthew Sweeney, A Round House, Alison & Busby/Raven Arts, £3.50
 
Michael Hofmann's poems have a fastidious flatness of tone, a calculated absence of rhythmic force or formal kick. Their manner is as nerveless as talk, at a casual glance, but such a glance could never discern the elliptical and tangential movement of ideas which in some of the poems eludes even prolonged consideration. It is not clear, for example, why in 'Day in the Netherlands' the careful description of a tour of Amsterdam is followed by a vague summary of the past of a love-affair:

          For the first time, we dare to talk 
          about our past, contiguity that
          preceded love, and kept it
          at bay . . . My room opened off yours, 
          it could have been a cupboard.

The tail of the poem, perversely uninformative, is bafflingly unrelated to the body of it: the reader feels either sold short or reproached for an inadequate power of synthesis and imagination.

For Hofmann's fastidiousness can extend to a mistrust of normal metaphorical procedures; he shuns a too solid poetical machinery, the thorough squeezing out of a subject. The elements of his poems tend not to be sequential but are juxtaposed, in suspension. Hence his fondness for points of suspension, floating each statement off on a row of dots into suggestive space before announcing a change of tack. They are a reflex of sensibility, an avoidance of the obvious, and there are certainly too many of them in Nights in the Iron Hotel.

That said, Hofmann's disinclination to find exact parallels, his sudden abandoning of a narrative line in favour of an enigmatic image, is part of an emotional coolness bordering on emptiness which has fascinating results. On the one hand vague, he is also disturbingly objective, in a physiological way — 'You move the fifty-seven muscles it takes to smile' — partic-ularizing the physical ambience of people. In 'Touring Company' he thinks of dust as consisting 'almost entirely of dead human skin' and contemplates a girlfriend's other disjecta membra: small change, theatrical make-up on the pillow, vanishing-cream. He sees, or hears, the evidence of people, rather than people themselves, and his poems attempt a kind of vestigial analysis, accounting for both public and private through collected but uninterpreted clues.

The memorable 'Gruppenbild ohne Dame' is a compelling reading of August Sander's equally memorable photograph, and 'Hausfrauenchor' and 'Boys' Own' guess sympathetically but elliptically at the emotional voids at the heart of the lives of German business wives and a universal public school master respectively. The ironical withholding of feeling makes poems about his own family and childhood more tantalizing and more upsettingly analytical than most; and poems about other people's relationships — Katherine Mansfield on the Cote d'Azur for instance, or 'Monsters of the Deep', where a relationship seems so unfathomable from the outside that it can only be approached by a kind of imaginative bathyscaphe —turn Hofmann's obliquity and exteriority to their fullest advantage.

The title-sequence of Julie O'Callaghan's first book is in 27 parts, each focusing not on eating and drinking in themselves but on occasions in which at some point something is eaten or drunk. They are ephemeral, unformed pieces, scraps, memories and oddities — as for example about an American baker who receives odd commissions:

          some guy'll call us up and say
          'I want my wife sculpted in dark chocolate 
          for our anniversary' . . .
          we like to think of our business
          as edible art.

These poems, too, are edible art, a kind of literary fast-food, just as much of the fodder they mention is junk food, 'double chocolate layer cake with ice cream', and so on. They don't attempt metaphor or structure — 'anecdotes' is too strong — but are daringly content to catch those moments when casual, almost unconscious consumption takes place; most successful are those set at night, at all-night
supermarkets and drive-ins, where eating and drinking are somnambulant and automatic. This is not food for its own sake or for necessity: it has to do with fatness and greed — until, at least, the final section, with a Cambodian speaker who is on the meagrest subsistence, yet still constrained by codes of hospitable selflessness.

The second part of the book opens with a set of Japanese poems, recording a courtly way of life in which every detail has significance. In this and in their manner they are the antithesis to 'Edible Anecdotes', but alas replace that poem's careless energy with inert gracefulness and derivative Poundian cadences. The charming but slight inhabiting of the worlds of other artists is made explicit in a piece spoken by a Degas dancer and in animations of three Hopper paintings. But energy is not regained and complexity established until a run of poems about O'Callaghan's native Chicago, dramatic monologues written in dialect, full of nervous clichés and self-assertiveness buoyed up by jingling internal rhymes. 'Morse Avenue' pungently itemizes the shops of a street 'which I thought I'd never leave' — but she did leave, and it is this which gives her view of America, and of Americans abroad, an ironic distance capable of both pain and amusement. The speaker of 'A Tour of the Place' travels Ireland with a girl mooning over her Puerto Rican lover:

          Marla drives and I hang out the window 
          taking pictures of historic-looking places. 
          She keeps talking about Juan
          and I keep eating candy bars.

Eating again — she catches herself and her friend in the slovenly, consumption-orientated complacency of Reaganite America, typified on a larger scale in an elderly tourist:
 
          We were really tickled
          at the quaint traditions those Europeans have. 
          And to think we saved them from Communism 
          makes me proud to be an American.

Julie O'Callaghan is an American who is not proud, and in these spoken poems, mined with platitudes, has found an original way of saying so.

Matthew Sweeney comes from the Ireland which O'Callaghan has adopted — though, like Michael Hofmann, he has lived, and sets poems, in Germany. His tactic in his new collection A Round House is often to present an observation —a comment or something seen —in a way that makes it vaguer and more suggestive. Even poems springing from specific sights are generalized, and people, places and occasions go unnamed: 'White are the streets in this shabbiest-/grown of the world's great cities'; 'Even the streets were white in that place'; 'He writes to say he has moved from the city'. This last is some middle-eastern town, but Sweeney has a marked reluctance to say which. His naturally observant, inquisitive eye is dulled by a constitutional portentous vagueness, implying significance by turning things into riddles when often we feel that their mystery lies more intriguingly in their specificity.

There are some successes, such as the masterly 'The Lake', which is both symbolic and actual, each quality enriching the other. 'View from a Hammock' is a very beautiful lyrical piece; and 'The Monks' is a memorable bizarrerie, a tiny anecdote of Latin-speaking monks playing reggae on the jukebox of a bar, a riddle vividly rooted in the concrete. The book as a whole, though, with 60 poems, over-exposes Sweeney's talents.