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

The poems in this collection are large in scope. The problem of linking the cosmos to the quotidian is one of choices, of finding the macro in the significant micro so that choice doesn’t seem random - it may well be but in a poem must never appear so. Such poems need to be bound together either by a strong constant diction and commitment to form, or by the sheer insistence and intensity of the inner life or by astonishment at the juxtapositions of macro and micro. Otherwise the connection hangs loose, becomes idle, becomes inert. Caroline Natzler negotiates these choices in various ways, but not always successfully.

     The title poem ‘Design Fault’ suggests design faults on a grander scale than the toaster she chooses as exemplar (my sympathy with her there!) but the poem gets engulfed by the personal, feelings, the anecdote and the things around the place.

     And though I risk being lynched for saying this, the job of lifting the self out of attachment to everything around and in us for poetic purposes, I reckon, is harder for women.

     These poems quickly become friends - their confessional intimacy, their loving gaze at the world, their sense of passivity and vulnerability. Most of these poems are also commendably ambitious. But the ones that rise above the dilemma proposed earlier to become strong poems do so through the fluency that carries them confidently to their destination: ‘Not a Warm Person’ (solipsistic but resolutely so), ‘Journey on the Edge’, with its long sentences, its repetitions of “against” - “against bare brown trees hung/ ...against the ache of a clearing... against brown forests shouldering over the heave of hills...” and so on; ‘Woolwich River Walk’ and ‘Buddleia’ (apart from its too high-pitched ending). The collection searches out big meaning and illustrates the process of realising this poetically.