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

Brownjohn has a ‘Poem about Men’ which is entirely about girls and women. It’s funny: however much women talk about themselves, promote themselves and slang men, men never seem to get tired of them. Perhaps there’s a note of tiredness though in Brownjohn’s belief that women have never been girls at all.

     The cat without e-mail is between the tables of a plastic restaurant in ‘Incident on a Holiday’, where a disco goes up in flames, unexplained by the backstreet barber, “the big / Conspiracy theorist, who avoids my eyes /In his pocked mirror”. The cat is distinguished from all the more-or-less-asleep human cyphers by sussing the customers, refusing their burger bits and being free of e-mail.

     The jokes seem intended to cheer the poet up in an increasing accidie. In ‘a dream - a new dream, I still have some’ the persona finds himself in the Apennines (where he’s never been) looking at a new London tube map. A small arrow is aimed at Bank:

                ... and above, in day-glo red,
The words of a less-than-cryptic message:
All Your life, wherever you are, YOU WILL
BE HERE, it said.

In another poem the persona identifies with the last mosquito of summer, reduced to a last fling, though “I had a good bloody summer”. In another “Drink” is “rapidly / Acquiring a me problem”, and “Sex” is "obsessed with me". Thinking of things he’s never done, he considers having a tattoo on some suitable organ and stops at a window with the sign “At last, the AIDS-free needle here for you!” In ‘Seven Sherlocks’, fantasy seems to be replacing reality, and life’s becoming a detective story, where it’s not certain whats really going on:

Then, you see, those clouds... They were
painted on the sky
In the manner of the artist Magritte.
But how could you tell? On longer
                                                    inspection,
I found crucial errors in the forgery.

     The waste cafés of the consumer society stretch all around the consciously ageing poet. This is a dingy period of human history, and there's nothing but human history, and it repeats itself like “another helping of baked beans on toast.” All that alters is “the grain of my outstretched hand.”

I gave up on the Mall of all Desires.
I thought it was pushing too much pleasure at me.

It was also other people’s pleasure, thank you...

... There’s no new, lasting desire after twenty-five.

After the Mall I saw the attraction of sorrow.
There was more scope in it for quenching old
                                                               desires...

The ‘Nostalgia Experience’ looks inviting, but it offers only virtual reality.

     Well, this is whistling in the dark, but it’s good whistling. And, on a walk, he decides to “go circular, rather than linear”. Back at the start of the walk again, two hours later, he feels invited to repeat the walk. Clean of his original footsteps, the path says: “I have changed in that time. So might you. Start over again?”