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

Well, here’s a book and for the life of me I can’t imagine who will buy it, unless they’re related to, or friends of, the people in it. People buy little enough poetry: the chances of someone buying a volume of poems by people they’ve never heard of, and most of whom are ‘new poets’, must be pretty slim.

For what it’s worth, Richard Aronowitz writes a poetry that quite likes to show you how much the poet knows, and he used words like ‘bronchioles’ and ‘umbilicus’, which are okay as words but they have their place, and one of them is in a ‘look at me I’m a clever poet’ poem. He can also do similes: New York yellow cabs ‘streak by like mustard on a hot dog’. Ros Barber has won things in poetry competitions and teaches creative writing. One of her poems begins ‘Suddenly they gleed into her life, clutching an insincerity of wishes’. As I said, she teaches creative writing.

Kathryn Gray, according to the blurb prefacing her poems, writes about family, ‘then and now’. Unfortunately, I tried reading her poems after ploughing through Aronowitz and Barber, but couldn’t make it past the first few lines of any individual poem. You know how it feels when you start a book and after a few pages you know you’re not going to do it? Exactly. Sian Hughes is published by Smith/Doorstop, who also publish me. One of her poems begins ‘Arsenal v. Newcastle’. I don’t admire all the poets my publishers publish. Thankfully, they don’t expect me to.

A.B. Jackson reminded me that there are all sorts of ways of starting poems. The sentence ‘Oncology Centre.’ could be one of them, but probably isn’t one of the most interesting. Tabish Khair writes poems like a professor of English at a university in India might write poems. Oh, he is, is he? Blow me down with a feather.

Kona PacPhee is apparently ‘one of the strongest new voices in British poetry’ and turns out to be very adept at writing a conventional British poem: poeticisms and clever-dickness, lyricism disguising the fact that there’s not a lot going on, and two words where one would do, but the one that would do is never going to be ‘perpendict’. Meanwhile, Robert Seatter is a veteran of competitions, has won some, and it shows. His poems are fashionably conversational, and competition formulaic. One or two here would be good with prudent editing, though it would change them enormously and use a sense of poetry he doesn’t seem to have: poems like  ‘Hipsters’, which is about being out with his mum buying trousers, is probably his true mark. Julian Turner has written a poem about golf. Sarah Wardles is the one poet I’ve heard of among this lot. I must have come across her name somewhere or other and she’s as competent as the most competent of the others. But by this time, time’s up.

This book is a predictable collection of demonstrations of how poems have been written, but it’s wholeheartedly – I’m tempted to say determinedly – devoid of any kind of invention, the kind of invention that seeks out ways in which poems might be written. But as I said before, since I can’t imagine anybody outside a closed circle actually buying it I suppose no harm’s done.