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

Please hang up. I try again.
“My father’s sudden death has shocked us all”
Even me, and I’ve just made it up,
Like the puncture, the cheque in the post,
Or my realistic cough. As I’m believed,
I’m off the hook. But something snags and
                                                            holds.

(From ‘The Excuse’.)

The opening poem in this justified PBS choice is one of many I’d love to quote in full, but this particularly as it introduces the main themes of the book. The sense of being pulled up short in that third line is wonderfully typical and prepares us for further acts of duplicity. As you might guess, we are not meant to let Donaghy off the hook. You may well feel you are hearing a natural, unguarded voice, but this is a conjurer at work. This is art, not life, and throughout the collection Donaghy never lets you forget it. The recurrent theme of art as illusion, the piling up of layers of meaning, puns, conceits and allusions are constant reminders. It isn’t that Donaghy’s writing is phoney, but that it self-consciously explores the necessary fraudulence or deceit in art. Rather than always take the more common route through irony to do this though, Donaghy tends to engage with the figurative indeed more deeply than with its engendering experience, though the idiosyncrasies of that experience would lead you to believe otherwise. For example, look at his rapt attention to the metaphor in this mature, Yeatsian love sonnet, ‘The River in Spate’:

...sweeps us both down its cold current.
Grey now as your father was when I met you,
I wake even now on that shore where once,
sweat slick and still, we breathed together -
in - soft rain gentling the level of the lake,
out - bright mist rising from the lake at dawn.
How long before we gave each other to sleep,
to air - drawing the mist up, exhaling the rain?
Though we fight now for breath and weaken
in the torrent’s surge to the dark of its mouth,
you are still asleep in its arms by its source,
small waves lapping the gravel shore,
and I am still awake and watching you,
in wonder, without sadness, like a child.

And there’s a strong aesthetic integration throughout the book that makes this poem, breathtaking though it is, not a virtuoso piece, but just a small and beautiful part of a whole.