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

The Seren press release states rather grandly that “A sense of mystery and mortality infuses these beautiful new poems... Her deep engagement with the landscape and history of her part of Wales is matched by a metaphysical questioning as to the the purpose and meaning of experience”.

     It is difficult for Bidgood to live up to such a lavish introduction. Her somewhat abstract use of the landscape, her questioning and her statement of how things “seem” or, indeed, how things are and what others might be thinking, results in a rather wandering type of poetry in which she is keen to show she has missed nothing.

     “Why has my mind/ pulled from a dusty shelf/ this abandoned file?” Bidgood questions in ‘Unread file’ which is too prosaic and insufficiently interesting. In ‘White Castle’ she concludes with nothing more than an elemental list:

Grass now, shadows on grass.
Stone, wind over stone.
Water, sliding of dark
under water. Silence,
voices inside silence,
Hear me, hear me...
gone.

     Whilst acknowledging that Bidgood does not write my type of thing, I did like her sharp-edged evocation of heat in ‘Cwmioie’ and I wished for more cynical humour of which she is sometimes capable. ‘Not another Marina’ is a case in point:

It’s not finished, but there’s not much doubt
how it’ll be - the familiar pattern
of boat-crammed water flanked
by tall red brick, with those finicky
post-modern gables. Soon will come
cloister of craft-shops - Celtic tat,
Indian scarves; perhaps one or two
pavement sculptures that shoppers
may or may not notice...

In other words, long live marinas.