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

Elaine Feinstein’s Daylight comes with the Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society and various encomia on the back cover from reviews in the ‘TLS’, ‘London Magazine’ and ‘Financial Times’, so I opened the book with pleasurable expectations. These were disappointed. Almost all of the poems are personal and private. People in them are addressed by their given names so that the reader, unless he or she happens to be familiar with the author’s family and friends, must feel excluded. Most are written in that style which is an unfortunate legacy of the fashion during the past few decades for translating the poetry from other, mainly Central European, languages, into a kind of flat, metreless verse which differs from prose only in that it lacks the fluency and rhythmic suppleness of good prose.

     Here is the last and characteristic stanza of ‘Picnic’, (dedicated to Roy Tommy Eriksen):

His red-haired wife laughs over
sizzling meat. The sunlight is euphoric.
And on the way home the same friend
ignored a painful back to climb over the edge
of a cliff to rescue your lost denture.

     This might be of some interest to Roy Tommy Eriksen but I find it difficult to believe that anyone else would wish to read it.

     When Feinstein attempts to write in prescribed metre and use a regular pattern of rhymes, as in ‘Wheelchair’, the results are disastrous. Here is what is intended to be a rhymed couplet in lines of seven feet:

We’ve seen coolies who sell goat’s milk and the men who
                                                                 plundered them
While the ghosts of Maugham and Coward haunt the new
                                                                Raffles hotel.

     To make metrical sense of that second line you would have to stress the second syllable in Raffles, and the rhyme of them/hotel would have made McGonnegal blush.

     In case you should think that I am paying attention only to technique and ignoring the content of the poems, failing to respond to what the Poetry Book Society selectors call ‘...toughly thoughtful meditations on loved people, living or dead’, I can only say that Feinstein’s matter seems to me relentlessly sentimental or banal. Here, as an example, is a dazzling epiphany from ‘Old Movies’:

Now I know: it’s love we crave not sex.