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

On the back of this arresting book Dickinson writes “one morning when I was six years old I woke up and could not hear a thing. My mother started writing me little letters and hiding them in the cleft of a tree. At school I became isolated. I made do with my own company. I started to write poems.” Though that would have been enough to make me read the book, when I did I found, from the poems, that she had gone on to become a musician and composer, and to settle down, if that’s the right verb, with a farmer in Cumbria on Scarberry Hill, the place which inspires the book. Furthermore, not with any old farmer, but one to whom she can write these lines in a sonnet:

We’re not designed,
at twice and a half each other’s age, to find
the details sorted on the surface level.

(‘Maybe This Kind of Love’)

and not on any old farm, either, but one that treasures sheep at a time of foot and mouth, and the government’s unfathomable, stupid directives to slaughter. Though the ‘culling’ is not an explicit presence, we are given a farmer’s year insight into the life many of us still dream about:

..Surviving lamb not good.
In stable. Is being fed milk. Later we feed
it, but, ‘it will be no good.’ We pick daffodils,
flowering currant, shift tulips, plant gladioli,
talk about seeds.

(‘April’)

and the threats that hang over it:

He wears his owl glasses, holds out the paper
spread to the sports or business, frowns
with the effort of concentration against
a tide of feeling.

(‘He Wears His Owl Glasses’)

So the collection is packed with things happening - funny, gothic, tragic, loving - as full with events as a novel, if you want to read it that way. But its first strength (which I haven’t been able to do justice to here, only quoting bits of poems) is the rich interior world, and the way Dickinson embodies that interiority in poems that are both formally satisfying and tonally so different that sometimes it really is like reading a new tongue. Michael Donaghy, on the back cover, says she has “an air of independence reminiscent of Emily Dickinson”, and though one might at first want to say ‘Steady on!’ actually he’s right. She’s someone writing in a voice that’s new because it’s very old. And very welcome.