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

Waterman is new to me, but I am pleased to have had the chance to make his acquaintance and see his work as a whole. The ‘story’ that emerges through these poems is moving and inspiring and the craftmanship in its telling is superb. This self-edited work of forty years, even as it explores the darkest themes of the arbitrariness of existence and the innate violence of the human specie, brims with a vitality and an in-spite-of-itself optimism borne of a keen eye and ear for what is beautiful. Thirty years in Northern Ireland observing and sometimes embroiled in conflict is I imagine symptomatic rather than generative of Waterman’s commitment to understanding suffering. In the midst of devastation and ruin, he is able to find images that sustain: from his 1977 Epilogues, ‘Answer’ - “A single garden of roses, thickly wrought/ red roses hoarding the sun in the silence/ of a low blind street end-on to a warehouse wall,/ scheduled for clearance.” The metre and rhyme is subtle and unobtrusive here as elsewhere and reservations you might have with his diversely ranging tones which swoop around between moments of elevation and lax, conversational idiom will vanish as you realise this feature is actually a hallmark that makes for exciting contrast. More recent poems probe more difficult questions of a religious/spiritual nature, the tone and dark humour not unlike R.S. Thomas. From ‘A Monody for Christmas’, a stanza that has haunted me since I read it:

What underwrites our quests, what fear or
Promise? God is too difficult, hints of grace
Denied by the world’s horror -
Yet to say that’s as if were I to gaze
In a mirror I could not see my own face

As when tide floods in on a fractured shore
Seaweed rises on it, tremulous,
Nourished and erect, that has before
Lain parched and flat, likewise it is with us,
Souls at the mercy of some cosmic flow,
Grateful for its embrace,
And helpless at its ebb: the waters go,
We shrivel back to stoniness below.