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

It’s not so easy for an English reviewer (I speak for myself) to get the conceptual slant to do justice to this poetry, moving as it does between the intensely situated ‘Airy Hall’ poems, the songs of love and praise, the ecstatic repetitions of folk verses to stretches of what seems like doggerel - infantile, extracted from its setting and music. Furthermore the poetry calls up places, events and icons that are entirely unfamiliar. In fact I’d say some authorial comment, in particular on the excerpts from the long narrative of the Jonestown cult, ‘Bill of Rights’, would have been welcome.

     The Airy Hall poems are poems of place. You feel the intimacy between the poet and its landmarks and signs:

The road’s equatorial run
Through Airy Hall;
Houses, whitewashed or mud-daubed,
Blinded by trees that catch sand
Before the grains lodge in slatted windows;
A trench, parched or flooded,
Bleached or submarine,
According to one of two seasons.

(‘Airy Hall’s Common Denominators’)

But in the other poems too there’s the intimacy with creatures, plants and weather, with a rich but somewhat menacing wildlife that contrast with the more distant and historical perspectives of the English poems. And there are the closely known voices of poverty - material and fundamental. Like this, from ‘Bill of Rights’:

Starbroek market has a broken clock.
The time it tells is always right

Twice, then there is the time it doesn’t tell.
Like how long this country can go without
Flour, rice, sugar, potato, corn, soap, oil, and
anything else you care to list.

Seductive but forever just out of reach are the particular cadences of Guyanese, the quick turns, the elaborate naming, the music running through it. And there are devices like the italicised commentaries that may break into songs of love and praise - un-boundaried and ecstatic.. ‘Bill of Rights’:

Theres only the life of the love to live
In this case us versus timelessness
Us two sharing this love that won’t die
Even as we blink out lives and expire
Our lives no longer than a blink in time

     The ‘New Poems’ are too small a selection to guess at further directions he may follow, though this sample still includes the extremes from the metaphysical of ‘Shadow Play’: “There isn’t enough light in the world./ Too many shadows define what I’ve become”, to the syncretic riddles of Scorpionfly: “You can draw an S/ from the top of my head/ to the tip of my tail./ There’s a sting in my tail/ And a tale in my head/ about that sting”.