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

Noting that Rennie Parker has written a study of the Georgian poets it’s a great temptation to start placing her own poems in that category. But it’s a temptation that ought to be resisted. It’s true that she writes about landscape and rural subjects, and quite a few of the Georgian poets did that, and she seems to aim for “short, self-contained lyrical pieces,” which is how one critic described Georgian poetry. And lines like the following would not be out of place in an anthology of that sort of writing:

Dull blankets jumped on the washinglines
Of intermittent farms
As a brutal wind
Flat as thrown boards
Laid the doors back
And the gates cracked flat
By stone house side.

But other influences have also crept in and the poems are mostly quite contemporary in the way they use language and respond to experiences and observations. A description of a country walk records a series of sights and sounds, and then ends:

A calm evening, then. Calm
Mist begins to descend.
The sign says Private Land.

And another poem, this one dealing with people and noting how the impulse to conform is so strong that it’s hard to resist the surface attractions of being like everyone else, says dryly:

They will expect you worn and same
as council houses,
just-like-mum-and-dad, the subtle
shift that proves how normal
everyone is

     There are a few poems where the language does show signs of an immersion in the writings of those earlier poets, but their brevity and clarity works in their favour and they settle alongside those with a sharper, more-modern tone. I don’t think this is major poetry but, like much of that produced by the Georgians, it has its charms.