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

Haslam likes to foreground language, and also what he’s doing and how he’s doing it. It’s as if he’s acquiring spontaneity through artificiality. The poems evoke the persona of a man happily out of key with his time, a highly self-educated lover of local lore, wandering the Pennines, between the hours of labouring jobs, in an ecstatic, daft - “Spirits… are a special privilege of the daft” - attempt to get off a false trail.

     There’s a great play with internal alliteration and random rhyme and half-rhyme. Birds and eggs are running images, and ‘Music Laid Her Egg in Language’:

Gag. Gauge. How to engage with Language
               again at my age, and each year more
the curdle of the moorland curlew over the
                                               keelham gate;
a tally-score of weekends on the beer.
I favour simple rhetoric for walking in the
                                                       dignity
of merely being here. I could occlude
             a sky too loud, an oracle, a cry, a call:
ill may it ail you, cooed or crowed, but
                                                  chilling cold…

His theme is “the dignity of merely being here”, “I’m an artist, and am glad of that”. A sort of taoist, he is wise and smiles like an infant. No urgency disturbs the dustbins in his scene, but he asks “How can you keep your clutch of mental eggs alive?” He’s alert for omens but knows “Not all messages are meant for you”. His variation (and improvement) on Ginsberg is “the best and worst minds of no generation have been literally had”. But his project is the game of sound - and sometimes there is little to do with the natural descriptions but read them aloud in your head: “Twite pipe and thus / the thrust of pipit twitter…” A twite is a kind of finch, and a pipit is a small bird like a lark, but is this, or something close to nonsense-rhyme, the point? Like Dylan Thomas he often seems to be reinventing language as he goes along, and it would be worth calling Dylan back from the dead to hear him read the sonorous ‘Four Balladic Idylls’. The book, organised as a fifteen-page poem, followed by nine poems as notes to it, and then two pages of “prosaic” (not very) notes, is a celebration of just being alive. It’s a book that will repay a little patience. You have to be as unambitious for a result as the poet. Haslam acknowledges the weird influence of Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612-22), but the book, though its own thing, reminds of Briggflats, and in the age of Ashbery should find a readership.