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

The Sound and the Fury

Poems, 1965-1968, by Robert Graves (Cassell, 25s.).
Out Loud, by Adrian Mitchell (Cape Goliard, 25s. or 16s.).
Where Babylon Ends, by Nathaniel Tarn (Cape Goliard, 21s. or 13s. 6d.).
Stoats in the Sunlight, by Stewart Conn (Hutchinson, 21s.).
Arrangements, by Harry Guest (Anvil Press Poetry, 25s.).

Robert Graves' latest collection has not been well received by the critics, who seem to have found it (as far as one can gather) somewhat arid. Well, there are perhaps here relatively few poems one will constantly recall to memory; and yet it seems to me that there are also few poems which do not enrich one's experience to some degree. The short meditations, or perhaps simply 'thoughts' on love, are written with all Graves' customary skill, and with an intensity of passion which has nothing to do with the flaccid sensuality of, say, Ginsberg, whose love poetry (sex poetry, rather) will be seen in due course as being as sentimental and bathetic as that of Lovelace.

Not that Graves is invariably excellent: indeed, he seems almost way-wardly uneven (one remembers the sense of shock with which one stumbled upon that excruciating poem Coronation Address some years ago at the back of an otherwise unexceptional book, The Crowning Privilege). I find the Songs is this present collection thoroughly indifferent; but such poems as Fact of the Act seem to me not to be far off Graves at his best.

Graves' generation viewed satirical poetry with suspicion; now, occasionally, he lets off a tiny squib which lands not far off target :

          Beasts of the field, fowls likewise of the air, 
          Came trooping, seven by seven or pair by pair; 
          And though from Hell the arch-fiend Samael 
          Bawled out 'Escapist!' Noah did not care.

This is very different in tone from the protest poems in Adrian Mitchell's Out Loud. The title is significant, for Mr Mitchell is not primarily interested in publication: he likes to read his poems to an audience (and the experience is not one which is easily forgotten; he reads with the utmost force and persuasiveness). But the fact that the poems were written for recitation does not always help them as poems. I find the seven songs which Mr Mitchell wrote for Peter Brook's US interesting, now, only as a souvenir of the performances at the Aldwych (which I personally found to be appallingly sanctimonious, untheatrical and boring: in fact, a confidence trick).
 
Elsewhere, however, there is no denying Mr Mitchell's rhetoric; To Whom it May Concern (which must be one of the most familiar poems of our generation) and To You seem good poems by any standards; and occasional couplets ring like an explosion in a bell factory. Someone once accused Edith Sitwell of 'wearing other people's bleeding hearts on her own safe sleeve' ; it is an easy accusation to make of anyone who writes about war and starvation without being either scarred or starved. Mr Mitchell does not make things any easier by giving way to sensation in, for instance, the quotation describing a burned body which runs along the top of every page of this book. But no-one can deny his compassion, which is cataleptic; and this book is a valuable social document somewhat towards the fringes of poetry.

Nathaniel Tarn is in a different case : Adrian Mitchell is his poems; Tarn seems to liberate his, so that they are suspended on the page without the visible support of the poet's personality. This is a dense poetry, neither as direct as Mitchell's nor as foursquare as Graves' ; a totally individual poetry, composed of words which form, somehow, an intimate relationship to each other within the form of the poem itself, and yet which seem to have an individual life independent both of each other and the poem. It is a strange phenomenon, and to read this book is to breath thin air. I found it utterly fascinating.

Stewart Conn is, simply, one of the most promising poets writing at the moment. I first saw his name in The Poetry Review, where Ambush was published (from a line of which this collection takes its title). The dark poems in the second half of the book are as evocative of atmosphere as a Hitchcock film; The Hallowe'en Party might be, in fact, a film scenario. The poems have a splendid visual sense, are marvellously direct, yet subtle. A fine first book.

Arrangements is the first hard-cover book to come from the Anvil Press, which has produced some handsome pamphlets and paperbacks. It is extremely well designed, and comparatively modest in price: if a private individual can produce this kind of book at this kind of price, what sort of businessmen can be running our large publishing companies? But after all, it's the contents that really matters, and I agree (for once) with the blurb-writer: Harry Guest is undoubtedly an important poet, although this book brings together poems written in somewhat startlingly disparate styles. Matsushima (which, again, I saw for the first time in the Review) and About Baudelaire might be by different poets. It is in the former that Mr Guest's true voice is to be heard, I would guess; and yet the two styles can fuse, as in the love poems towards the end of this collection, which are very memor¬able. It is good to welcome what may be a notable new imprint, and what will undoubtedly be an important new voice.