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

Rockingham Press, 11 Musley Lane, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 7EN 68 pages £7.95

It is not an insult to describe Frances Wilson as a poet of the ordinary. She takes domestic situations and constructs small dramas that grow with the telling. Wilson’s strength is a visual accuracy. Family history poems are not easy to pull off because, well, we’ve all got them, but if done justice, a rich bank of stories can be brought to life. Wilson does this well, at least at the start of No Love Lost, with her aunt in a blue feather hat and sporting her fox fur (though later she’d hurl bricks/ at the hunt...). One of the poems early on in the book Living Next Door To A Topiarist is a is a lovely example of cross-fence suburbia: She saw him from her kitchen window,/ shears slack in his grip, eyeing the bushes/ as she gulped coffee, unstacked last night’s dishes,/ programmed the washing. At the end of a day spent out of the house the narrator returns to sit in her garden to find the man still clipping away. I won’t give away the end but it’s a gentle poem done straight. Wilson has a clean, effective way of writing that has a lot of charm. Some don’t work - I didn’t like Knowing how to Live, for example, because it seemed a lazy memory, but while there are a few I could skip over, there was soon another one to settle into. Sometimes she spoils things with a tendency to wrap the poem up in a bow at the end with a concluding phrase - and sometimes she needs an editor who will push her further. An example of this is Unfrozen, when a woman, clearing out, finds an old audio-tape. At the end of a story taped from the radio, the tape runs on and she hears herself busy in the kitchen, ...making icecream. Probably rum-and-raisin/ which never really froze. Or pistachio. Unfortunately, the rest of the poem isn’t decisive enough, the image of the husband too passive, and it runs out of stamina. Nevertheless, there’s plenty to like here.