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

     Yeats said that there were only two fit subjects for poetry: sex and death. Paul Groves is taking no chances in his new book, which sparks constantly between those poles, and whose strikingly appropriate cover is Robert Capa’s photograph of a diabolically bearded and masked man at a ball, clutching the bare back of his dancing partner. The poems are arranged alphabetically by title and this throws up some fortuitous couplings – between, for example, the opening piece about a spring awakening in a classroom in Bern:

The boys of Bern are beating their meat.
The professeur doesn’t see them do it.
He writes on the blackboard, small and neat.
Metaphysics is driving them to it.

and the next, on the death of the poet’s mother: 

Orphaned at fifty!  I have joined
Dickensian waifs, refugee children,
the tiny survivors of car crashes
to whom nothing is explained...

There follow (as chance dictates): a highly amusing piece about a dinner party with a naturist couple, a haunting meditation on suicide, then ‘After Matins’, in which a church organist allows his lustful thoughts to “stray beyond conformity and death”, neatly bringing Eros into conjunction with Thanatos. But as this thematic tacking makes its way from A – Z (and the very last poem of the book – ‘Undying Affection’ – seems uncannily apt, too) some of the disadvantages of the editorial decision become apparent. Certain tics and quirks of style catch the eye or the ear simply because they have ended up in adjacent poems: so, for example, the witty phrase “designer water” features twice in four pages – hardly serious, but the second quaff no longer refreshes. More problematic are the pieces on pages 48 and 49, which both end with a melodramatic single sentence. None of this affects the quality of individual poems, but it does lessen the impact of the whole book.

     Groves’s style is distinctive, owing something to Larkin, not only in its grumpy, politically incorrect manner and determination to call a spade a spade, but in a certain incredulousness at human fate: “What utterly dumbfounds me is/ that nobody I know is scared...”, he writes in the excellent ‘Here Today’, just as Larkin thirty years earlier: “If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange:/ Why aren’t they screaming?” (‘The Old Fools’). The directness in some of the poems is certainly bracing, once or twice devastating; elsewhere, it verges on the sentimental (see ‘Message in a Bottle’) and somewhat prurient. Groves’s strength is his ingenuity - his subjects are always well chosen: Hitler as a child, tearing the legs off a cranefly in his Bible class;  a reverse striptease, in which the final erotic thrill is as she “lifts a stylish hat, and holds it like/ a veritable crown. Please do it now I cry...”; a visit to a Chinese lover who spouts propaganda:

‘...Soviet equipment and technology began
to be less important to us.’ I felt
between her legs. She became passionate
about her message. ‘In 1983
one hundred trucks were delivered to Chuxian County...’

There are many poems here which are at the very least clever ideas, some just good stories, others the poised expression of life’s ironies.  And there is a great deal that is very funny.

     I must say, however – and bearing in mind Paul Groves’ own exhortation in Thumbscrew 15, that reviewers should “look the Devil in the eye, and tell the truth” – that for all the intricacy and diversity of this collection, it left me uneasy. Yes, I admired the virtuoso performances, such as ‘In the Frame’, which manages to repeat a rhyme pattern five times (wall / shower / past / banners // tall / power / last / manners etc.); I laughed at the notion of ‘Leda and the Fly’; I was impressed by the overall coherence, by the decision not to range too widely in theme, to focus on those preoccupations in the title... But something is lacking. Perhaps it is that there is not much sense of the weight of the chosen words here, their interiors, their resonance. They are brick-built, not hammered out in bronze. There is a neo-Augustan edge, a Cavalier swash – but I miss something more deeply interfused. The imagery, too, is hit and miss. In ‘Model Behaviour’, the descriptive detail is at one moment blandly clichéd (“Tex, a feisty American photographer/ with a chrome grin...”), at the next strikingly memorable (“holding her empty abdomen like a phone/when the guy at the other end has hung up”). And, for all its terseness, some of Groves’s poetry takes far too long to say what it must. This may be to do with the use of rhymes. Again, they are often audibly effective, but there is too often the feeling that the rhymes are in the driving seat, that they have a joy-ride to take us on and nothing is going to stop them. I particularly felt this in ‘Next to Godliness’ (despite the happy marriage of “et cetera” to “Kama Sutra”), and in ‘Point of Reference’:

I cannot move from here because
my father knew
(my father was
alive until a year or two
ago) of my abode
but as you cannot teach the dead

no words of mine could now inform
him of the change, the altered norm...

In the face of such sentiments, it feels wrong to point out the slight sense of artificiality that comes with “abode” and “norm”, but it does weaken the poem. The poet who opts for rhyme and metre, but still wants to sound conversational and contemporary, is going to have to work hard. Rhyme should sound inevitable, whether overt or discreet, and there is plenty in this collection where it feels that way – particularly as half-rhyme in, for instance, ‘The Chestnuts’. But think how many of Hardy’s poems are unreadable because he insisted on forcing the lines to go where he wanted (he even left blanks to fill in later!). Groves’s poetry is utterly readable – and I can recommend it to those who like their satires of circumstance neat, sourly humorous and with a dash of machismo.