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

Months can go by with every new poem I read leaving me thinking 'so what?' or, in the immortal words of Peggy Lee, .... .is that all there is?' These constant small disappointments take their toll and I find myself becoming the Eeyore of the Hundred Acre Wood of Poetry, head down, hands in pockets, plodding through thickets of words and meaningless line-breaks in continued affirmation that a great deal of published poetry indeed inhabits a Gloomy Place. And then I discover Lynne Wycherley's poem 'Bewick Swans Arrive at Ouse Washes'. By the time I've reached the last line I'm running out of that Hundred Acre Wood and giving a great joyous shout.

Lynne Wycherley's poems have appeared in numerous publications
and anthologies, and she's enjoyed success in a variety of poetry competitions over the last five years. 'Bewick Swans Arrive at Ouse Washes' is the opening poem in her much-awaited first full collection. It's a poem that cannot be bettered. It's only 13 lines long, and contains a mere 66 words. Yet in this short stretch of writing the reader travels from a place of quiet resignation to one of uplifting, unstoppable hope.

Just when I think the winter has won,
a black book closing

on pages of light,
and the darkness sways on its haunches

like an impatient bear
scooping up silver minnows,

I sense an agitation in the sky,
long Vs trailing like pennons.

Altocirrus, swans white
as the tundra they come from.

Their cries multiply. Their bodies
crash-land on the water

star after star after star.

Wycherley is rooted in the outdoors - and many poems in this collection are set in the Fens of Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Norfolk. These poems are informed by her knowledge of geology and archaeology, and she uses this to underpin her fascination with the passage of time, with the links between the past and the present, with the human spirit and with relationships. Her writing is compressed, and this, coupled with her ability to choose new and surprising metaphors makes one read her poems slowly. I found myself returning to re-read and savour them over and over again. Here are two examples, the first from ‘Waiting for the Larks’, the second from ‘Solstice’:

We wait for skylarks
to free the light’s song,
high notes spilling
from clefts in the blue —
waterfalls, a dance of diamonds.

** * * * * * *

Half bat, half moth,
it hovers at the lychgate

not first light
but the presentiment of light

love’s silkworm.

Looking back on these two examples, it’s impossible not to comment on the all-permeating use of light in her poems, in all its meanings. The title of the collection is taken from the final line of ‘Solstice’, and out of the collection of 39 poems nearly half make reference to light. She has a painter’s eye and it shines through in her writing.

I don’t know how much time Wycherley spends editing her poems,
but I’m full of admiration at the seemingly effortless way that the whole is so much greater than the sum of the individual parts. ‘Coming of Age’ is a tender and very powerful description of that suspended point when an eleven-year old girl hovers between childhood and adolescence. It opens with the girl walking into the distance, on Southwold beach. Here’s the final stanza:

A backward glance to the island
of her family. Distances greater than sand.
Their three heads clustered over driftwood,
a pen-and-ink miniature. The east wind
tugs at her skirt, turning the page.

Two of the finest poems in the collection are ‘My mother Arrives in
the Fens’ and the longer ‘Earth Man’, about her father. Two people from totally different backgrounds:

I think of her peeping from her window,
a poppy in vitro,
the brown seeds of her eyes
in search of another sun

while my father stalked the fields.
Fluent. Wildfowling.
The fen in his bones,
the Wash in his blood.

‘Earth Man’ has the best opening two lines I’ve read in a long time:

         How can I speak your spirit
             in the small skin of a poem?

But Wycherley does speak his spirit, and while she recognises the
struggle of trying to define the indefinable, she has one of the best stabs at it I’ve read in a long time. She’s far more accessible than John Burnside, but every bit as complex. Whycherley’s choice of form and rhyme or free verse is subservient to the subjects of her poems, always subtle and never obtrusive. ‘Borderland’ is a highly accomplished sonnet, as is ‘Bachelor of Science’. She has a fine ear for the lyrical. I for one hope her next collection follows soon.