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

From minimalism to the large slack scope of Libby Houston. I guess the point of publishing a selection from a poet’s work covering a long time span should be to show changing preoccupations and developments. I can’t detect any development here. Even in the part devoted to children’s poetry (apart from a couple of delightful, tight poems) the poetry continues with the generous license that the early years of the 60s permitted. Right through to the end they continue to appear - mythological throwaways, big dollops of whimsy and archaic turns - lost in streams of words with no holds barred. Take this from the 60s-70s Unfenced Poured Minglings:

...o Sea! They laugh for the Instrument
& vastly-growing territory! It’s not nigh
                                                  impossible.

     The poems from 71-80 continue rumbling on like loose canon:

A demon took over Frank, chief
at the café on the motor-way
arms akimbo, as midnight clicks, he
summons one of the girls, says

I want you to count the tealeaves
we’ve used here today...

then follows some incomprehensible tale. Even when the poems are short they seem to read weirdly off-beam. From the same epoch:

Earth bound stream the bed
blurred under where shadows flick
fish slip from our hair

From ‘On Boyd Bridge’

Crags like bones -for then
and for my back the frank hear
bent on strawberries

From ‘Below Draycott Sleights’

     Only sheer paranoia focuses her (‘On Emnity’). And the poems for children (apart from the delightful ‘Black Dot’ and ‘For a Unicorn’) show no sign of being much shaped for that readership. I think the poet gives herself a great deal of permission. By the 90s she’s adding experiments with page layout, font varieties, advertising copy, but it doesn’t help the basic problem of conceptual and formal discipline. And it’s great shame! For there are passages of great originality and beauty (‘Midsummer Stars’ and ‘The Trees Dance’) which suggest that starting to work in a period of lesser license might have allowed her to select her real voice and continue to refine and develop.