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

Pound said poetry should be as well written as prose, which is a minimum, so it’s nice to read something that’s better-written than prose.

     Atkinson compares a poem to “the tiny cobalt flame that purred from a split in the coal… mined too deep sometimes for your own good”. He exploits range. A poem begins with a risk of opaqueness, willing to test whether we’re serious enough to work out how the last king of the Incas is like a frosty sky, and why that is sharp as “anathema”:

Metaphysical light rears in the sky, an
                                                    Atahualpa,
Element of air by frost cut sharp as anathema,
Trees, rooves of houses, locked in his ice of
                                                    white gin.

But the poem is aiming for a simple eloquent tenderness:

Outside, a witter of bird-song,
far-off disgruntlement of traffic.
Here, becalmed in the human space, the
                                           chairs sit quietly.
They know that nothing ever will have been
                                                   their fault,
as the light runs its fingers over them,
riffles the bedclothes, touches my face,
and wakes me in the morning you imagined
when you wrote…

A lot of stories of wounded humanity are lying untold but identifiable among the allusions, the personifications and “they knew that nothing ever will have been their fault”.

     The poems are metaphysical, not only in their wit - doves, which are also years, “tumble like unconverted tries” - but also in their brink onto another dimension. Angels, as in Kieslowski’s films, “hover at the camera’s edge”. Perhaps “it” will come like this: “a finger presses on the heart until it stops”. But the actual angels for him these days are children: “And what’s a poem beside sons and daughters… It was given, the time of children: and is spent”.

     He handles touchy subjects, like childhood sex, with great frankness and delicacy, and without disequilibrium. His own nightmare childhood, detailed in his book A Sleep of Drowned Fathers, is given a ritual treatment in ‘Original Sin’. There are poems that steer close to madness, like ‘The Last Supper of Judas Iscariot’ and ‘A Doctor in the House of the Marquis de Sade’, and others: a malaise apparently fuelled by both the horrific twentieth century and his infancy. ‘Mustard Oil’ is a truly weird poem. A friend Shastri, after reading the papers, decides to starve to death: “… my life here has no worth. It is an insult, and I ought to end it”. Another friend massages him constantly with mustard oil but also with secret words in his ear, which the persona would like to know, for Shastri is cured.

     We’re not likely to be cured by reading this book, but at least the illness is acknowledged. All of these poems feel as if they had to be written, and finely written. There are some lyrics at the end, based on traditional Irish airs, reflecting life on an Orkney island and the deaths of four young fishermen. They are very beautiful and have been set to music.