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

This is quite a remarkable long poem and I say that as someone who normally shies away from long poems. In this one, however, the quality of the language, the subject-matter, and the overall structure of the poem, combine to give it an impetus that never allows it to lapse into dullness or obscurity.

     It’s perhaps necessary to say something about the background to the poem. The ‘Crag Inspector’ of the title is, as Hart describes him, “pure whimsy”, a name taken from a sign scrawled above a hut on Holyhead Island. Hart then used it to create a persona for a poem he wrote some years ago (it’s included in this book as a kind of introduction) and then extended the idea to his longer poem about Bardsey Island which forms the major part of the volume under review. ‘The Crag Inspector’ does what his name implies but the poet also uses him as a kind of vehicle for reflections and comments on environmental and related matters:

There’s a gull follows me around,
we are partial
to the same kind of biscuits.

Our planet is going into the darkness
of the dead. No-one will be here
to describe it as progress.

That short excerpt is from Hart’s poem about Holyhead Island, and his longer work is more complex and ranges across the land and sea and animals and birds and fish. In many ways the writing becomes like a song of praise to all these things, and I was occasionally reminded of William Everson’s great poem, ‘A canticle to the Waterbirds’, though that may only be because of the feeling of religious intensity that runs through Hart’s and Everson’s work.

     I’m conscious of not having touched on many aspects of Hart’s poem - and space, and the fact of its totality, prevent me from using excerpts to illustrate how it works. It moves across the pages in a variety of ways and can switch from the near-rhapsodic to passages of down-to-earth speech without a loss of pace. And it takes in the personal and political (in the sense of what is being done to the planet) and blends it in with the strong sense of place that is the backbone of the poem.

     ‘Crag Inspector’ is not an easy poem to read and it demands attention from the reader, along with a willingness to engage with its powerful and serious statements. But it never becomes bland, nor does it look for easy answers. It deserves to be read.