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

Cinnamon Press
Meirion House
Glan y afon
Tanygrisiau
Blaenau Ffestiniog
Gwynedd
LL41 3SU
www.cinnamonpress.com
ISBN: 978-1-905614-69-1
£7.99

Some poets can take you to places where you’ve never been before, and such is their special skill that you recognise them as if they were old friends. When you read Barbara Dordi’s most recent collection you’ll feel at home all over the world - in LA, in Kent, in New Zealand, in the Languedoc, in Cannes.

It takes a very special talent to achieve this. Poets can be remarkably portentous when they’re writing about places; Dordi’s is such a light, affectionate, often witty, touch that these places come alive effortlessly, drawing you sympathetically into their ambience: the quality of spring in Cannes where "the plot always surprises"; of autumn in the Languedoc; of the Weald in winter; of "the highs and lows in LA" - and, indeed, of more domestic scenes, as the maid attempts to clean Cezanne’s studio.

Dordi is a very visual poet; alertly observant to light and colour and shape, perhaps especially to the "soft English light" of the English landscape. Deft, economical brushstrokes paint moods: the emptiness and solitude of unremarkable Gravesend, where "deserted streets whisper their plight / in echoes of hollow footsteps", as well as the moving vacancy of houses ("the house will not be in when people call") or rooms after a death, where "blank pictures / haunt the walls in frames of dust". Even the boots of Gertrude Jekyll seem to come alive themselves, as the gardener "returns to the warmth of home", and they are left "soil-encrusted, laces askew, tongues drooping into the void waiting to be filled." This is a collection to read with great pleasure and increasing admiration.