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

Readers who like John Milton may enjoy Adrian Brown’s The Ram in the Thicket (Hearing Eye, ISBN 9781905082353, £6.95). This 813 line long poem takes on the subject of Abraham and Isaac and the cultural transition from human to animal sacrifice. Adrian Brown clearly had a lot of fun writing his poem, particularly the section leading up to what can best be described as a camp orgy, one result of which is the conception of Isaac. Three visitors arrive at the patriarch’s desert home - visitors, the poem suggests, who are the three who later turn up in Sodom and have to be protected from that city’s lusts by Lot. The visitors bathe and change in preparation for the feast being readied for them by Abraham’s people: they then appear

In raiment yet more lustrous than before.
Sheer gauzy robes, pearl-white, diaphanous,
Criss-crossed by shimmering bands of antique gold,
Flowed loosely over bronzed firm-muscled flesh,
With jewelled waistbands resting on slim hips,
And nether garments - cut to such snug fit
As emphasised callipygean charms -
Tucked into tasselled boots with tapered heels.....

The prophet Abraham, who converses with God, is honoured in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faiths and Brown risks offending all three traditions by having Abraham stage-manage the sacrifice, hiding the ram beforehand and acting out, for the witnesses, the divine intervention. The burden of his version is that Abraham, a progressive thinker, has witnessed child sacrifice, abhors it and gets it abolished. Few will quarrel with his conclusion that human sacrifice is still practised in ‘Holy War’ or by ‘hawkish demagogues’ who go about

Bullheadedly to sacrifice their sons
On battlefields where mass destruction yawned,
Then grant their graceless gods of gilt-edged greed
Gross usufructs of money, power and oil.

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Size. Anthony Thwaite’s Collected Poems has 445 pages, Peter Scupham’s Collected has 472 pages, Peter Porter’s is famously in Two Volumes; youngest kid on the block is George Szirtes whose New and Collected Poems, 520 pages, (ISBN 9781852248130) has just been published by Bloodaxe. Alongside it, from the same publisher, comes Reading George Szirtes by John Sears (ISBN 9781852248147). This is not a review so I feel OK admitting that I haven’t read all of either book, but, quite early on (page 24) Sears gives a very useful quote from Szirtes

I cannot help feeling that what language theorists tell us must be true, that language is a very thin integument or skin stretched over a mass of inchoate impressions, desires and anxieties. I cannot help feeling that the gap between the signifier and the signified is potentially enormous, and that the whole structure of grammar and syntax is a kind of illusion that hides this unpleasant fact from us.

This strikes me as being a courageous statement: it’s also very helpful - go back to the Szirtes poems in this issue and read them again with this quotation in mind. I think it makes a difference, adds significance to the reading.

George Szirtes carries much on his shoulders. He was born in Hungary, historically the border between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires; he is of Jewish descent - both his parents survived the Holocaust; he left Hungary with his parents as a refugee after the 1956 uprising. His mother killed herself in 1974. This helps understand the density, the richness off his work. It’s possible to open the book at any page and be astonished. My two favourites, at the moment, are page 216, ‘Burning Stubble at Szigliget’ and page 274, ‘Chalk White: The Moon in the Pool’. Highly recommended.

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Michael George Gibson (see also Letters page), a member of the fundamentalist tendency in British poetry, has sent his Press Release - here’s part of it

‘He (MGG) is concerned to establish a clearer idea of what poetry truly is.

Mr Gibson is a member of The Poetry Society with which he has for some years been in serious dispute - notably with Ms RUTH PADEL, a Chair of the Society. The Poetry Society seeks to ignore and suppress him so far as possible. These matters are touched on in The Observer article of 13.04.08 ‘Poetry guardians reject modern verse.’

Mr Gibson is in the process of publishing on his web site www.michaelgeorgegibson.org critical articles on the views on the nature of poetry published and expressed by such as Mr ROGER FRY, Mr JAMES FENTON (a former Professor of Poetry at Oxford), Ms RUTH PADEL (said to be a candidate for the Professor of Poetry at Oxford this time), Mr DON PATTERSON, ‘a prizewinning poet’, and Mr MICHAEL SCHMIDT, Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University. Mr Gibson has published an essay on TED HUGHES in which he suggests that Mr Hughes was not always a true poet.’

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Josephine Dickinson’s new book, her fourth, is Night Journey (ISBN 9781906601010, Flambard Press). There are a lot of poems about grief and loss, observed with very clear eyes: Josephine is not so much appalled by death as astonished. And all the time there’s the grounding landscape of her chosen home country, it’s rocks and heather, its beasts, both domesticated and wild. Quite a roller coaster ride, but a journey well worth the ticket price.

Alan M Kent’s Druid Offsetting (ISBN 9781898795094, Lyonesse) removes us from Josephine’s Cumbria to his Kernow (Cornwall to us incomers and tourists). This is not just, as the back cover proclaims ‘Prescribed reading for anyone interested in Cornwall.’ It’s a passionate investigation of what it is to belong to a battered and neglected community. There are some good poems too; I liked particularly ‘Careers Officer’ and ‘Tinners Rabbits’.

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Among other books of interest received are the anthology Dark Matter, Poems of Space published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a volume of Alastair Reid’s Selected Prose: Outside In (Polygon), poems from James Kirkup, Marsden Bay (Red Squirrel Press), Peter Oswald, Wayland (Oberon Books), Alexis Lykiard, Unholy Empires (Anarchios), Keith Chandler The English Civil War Part 2 (Peterloo Poets - which, despite rumours of a wind down, seems to be continuing to publish). From Polygon there’s also a reprint of the Second World War poet Hamish Henderson’s Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica which has a new Introduction from Adrian Mitchell and reprints the Introduction to the Second Edition by Sorley Maclean.

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The veteran American poet W.D. Snodgrass died in January. Mick Imlah also died in January: as well as being a considerable poet he had been poetry editor of the TLS since 1993. His death, at the age of 52, from motor neurone disease, is a great loss.