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

My mother plucked from beneath
The roof gutter a naked nestling sparrow
kept it in a lined shoe box.
Somehow she knew how to
Cajole it into adolescence.

   These are deceptively simple poems, written in a conversational style. They can be read at different levels, and many could be enjoyed by children as well as adults. Most of the poems are about animals, but there are other associations, subtle commentaries on politics and historical changes. I was reminded at times of D.H. Lawrence and occasionally of Ted Hughes:

A wicked predatory eye and spear beak
A body taut and kill-ready (Herons)

   But Harold Rosen’s work has a lighter, more anecdotal touch. One poem, Honey Bee, the story of a bee that comes back to life, is reminiscent in its theme of The Awakening by a very different poet, the sadly neglected William Wantling. In Rosen’s poem, the dead bee is a Bedraggled blob / Found in the sink:

She didn’t think so
Put it on a sheet of kitchen roll
To dry off
Took it into the garden
Nudged it onto a nasturtium leaf
In the sun

In the morning she is straight outside
To see if her dead bee
Has resurrected itself

   The creatures in the poems often take us back to childhood and to
a different epoch. From Tortoise:

In Club Row market
You could buy a skinny dog
or a forlorn chained monkey.
There was an overcrowded stall
Doing a brisk trade,
Tortoises galore
Kids coaxing their dads
Then carrying away in two hands
Their unlikely objects of desire.

   Or from Haimishe Fish:

At the fishmonger’s in Hessel Street
A long tank crammed with fish
Hundreds of them
Sluggish fins and tails
Resigned fatalistic grey
Carp and bream,
Haimishe fish
Just this side of death

     And here the political and historical are brought in:

Haimishe — from the home country
Where the old folks had come from.
Was this the nostalgia of exiles?
From Vilna Odessa Warsaw
The tastes of home.

   One poem, Maginot Line, recalls wistfully the summer of 1939 in
France:

We ate his peaches from a paper bag.
The juice dribbled down our shirts.
Shimmering untainted August
And I saying hello to every minute.

   The sense of impending horror is made all the more powerful by
the quiet, nostalgic tone.
   Some of the poems take the form of a parable. The last poem in
the book The Two Frogs is the tale of an older frog who follows a
younger frog into a saucepan of milk. The older frog is drowned, but
the younger frog survives. The story is told by Akiva the Jew to his
dispossessed friend / Ghada the Palestinian. We’re left to choose our frog, to draw our own conclusions.

   As I mentioned at the beginning, the style of the poems is
conversational, deliberately prosaic (in spite of the fact that each line
begins with a capital letter, something we normally associate with
regular metre). Generally, this works well, making for readability. Yet I couldn’t help wishing that some of the poems were a little more pared-down, a little sharper. For example, these lines could do with some cutting: We had a tortoise / Installed in our back yard. / I never took to it. / Though my grandmother suprisingly did. / Fed it regularly. At this point, I almost gave up reading the poem. But a little later in the stanza, stronger lines follow: the tortoise had no tricks / And its dry prehistoric head / Was not quite credible. Here I see the tortoise in a different light, and I am shown (not told) something important about the narrator and about us as human beings. There were times when I felt that small sections could and should have been removed - we are simply told too much that we have already understood.

   Yet overall, the poems persuade us with the easy way they delve
into the every day lives of creatures, human and other, who are trying to find a space and to shape a life in a rapidly shifting universe.