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

Those who read poetry in order to identify with the poet’s personality; those who wish for wistful satire of that kinder, more courteous land we call Youth Remembered; and above all those who consider it to be no business of any poet to disturb their hard-won materialist philosophy or religious belief - all of these may save themselves a parcel of trouble by leaving this collection well alone.

For this is serious stuff: this work is about Psyche to-day and yesterday, this is a map of Heaven arid Hell, of prayer and meditation, of redemption and of unity. The first section, also titled Oracle Bones, is principally concerned with a rendering of the symbol of the crucifixion contrasted with pre-existing spiritual forms; the second, mainly translations from Virgil’s Georgics, from the Greek and from Dante, represents an entr’acte before the magnificent climax of the long (just over 700 lines) masterpiece, Dies Irae, to which are appended two short pieces, the latter being one of only two poems in the book written directly out of the poet’s external life - a sonnet in memory of (but not about) his mother.

When one’s parents are no longer alive, a certain question renews its urgency: whose life am I living? The Viennese artist and wit Anton Kuh put it this way: “a man either has a picture of the world, or he lives in a world of pictures” - the latter, of course, being how corporations and governments would prefer us to live. Harpur’s thesis in this book is that in order to have a picture of the worid it is necessary to rehearse the prehistory of Western religion. To do this, he adopts a series of masks, or personae, most often of unsuccessful mediators between the divine and the human.

The first and last sections of the book are prefaced by, respectively, four and two epigraphs. In their identities is written the programme which Harpur’s work undertakes, and they are important guides to the reader. The first of these kindly wraiths is the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who held that everything is in flux - you can’t step into the same river twice - and that the Logos (word) is the sole object of wisdom. The second is C. G. Jung who evaluated poetry by the extent to which it connects with the collective unconscious - for Jung, the life of a poet is justified by the poetry. Then comes a mediaeval schoolman, didactic and in this company not a little ridiculous, but all too like what we have been given instead of a religious education; and at the rear of those introducing part one, an animist prayer to a ‘mighty turtle’. Collectively, these seem to say to the reader: you have much to unlearn.

The poetry begins with a beautiful, haunting and densely allusive piece in which the incompleteness of human action is symbolised by its lack of title and length (13 lines). it summarises the theme - the origin of religion - explored in the remaining poems in this section. This is done in various ways. One is the adoption of the voice of a priest, always in crisis, whether at Delphi when the oracle finally fell silent or an augur, superfluous because “this world is moving into reason” and necessarily, as something is gained, something else is lost. Of course, not all priestcraft is conducted in good faith, as The Assyrian Extispicist reveals - the nonce-word of the title flagging the essential contradiction of the central character, who has too late realised that

        ...the revelations
Do not always come to pass.
And anyway my job requires
The king does not know everything.

The issue of the significance of priesthood is picked up in The Delphic Priest, the narrative poem that closes the first part of the collection. This poem is a faultless demonstration that poetry is still a valid narrative form, and shows the power of simple language from the start:

My fathers father’s father said
That a long long time ago
When deities still came to earth...

Immediately we are given both the rhythmic intonation, strong but supple, that carries the reader through the poem with a clear voice, and the sense of deep antiquity and loss. This is a truly powerful meditation on human religious needs, and upon which aspects of them are and are not subject to the flux of Heraclitus. The ancients had not only oracles but also heroes, and in two poems Harpur pays homage to his Irish-British ancestry. Cuchulainn’s Fate concludes with the recipe for heroism in resounding couplets and OisÌn’s Return re-works what might be thought exhausted ground: the reality of Ireland to-day, just another materialist province of the West against the symbolic Ireland of Celtic dawns and twilights ancient and modern.

Fine as the poems in the first section are indeed, they are only an extended prologue to Dies lrae, in which the theme of the dialectic of life, the simultaneous necessity for and impossibility of religion (at least, as it appears in its senescent Western manifestations) is magnificently resumed. It is valuably prefaced by an epigraph from Robert Bultmann: “in every moment slumbers the possibility of its being the eschatological moment: you must awaken it”. The E-word is derived from the Greek for ‘last’ and refers to the final things - death, judgement, the afterlife. Bultmann is describing, in the stilted language of the professional theologian, an attitude to enlightenment.

A 20th-century Protestant theologian, Bultmann held that God was ‘Wholly Other’. This position (which was also held by a number of medieval Schoolmen) disposes of the usual objections to God, such as the problem of Evil, whilst raising urgently the question of whether any human awareness of God is even possible. Bultmann held that it was, via an existentialist route: one should approach a text fully conscious of the problematic nature of one’s own existence. He was thinking of the Bible: I take it that Harpur is inviting us to do the same with Dies Irae. Such a reading liberates the full force of the poem, so that may be not only intellectually but emotionally apprehended and even - who knows, since any poem is but a pebble thrown into the lake of the reader’s Psyche - induce the occasional glimpse of the Truth. Particularly if one has the courage to read it aloud, which its strongly-stressed lines and simplicity of language make it easy to do.

Indeed, this simplicity is one of its most immediately attractive features: it is perfectly crafted, artlessly perfect. In this respect, it is a glorious reproach to many contemporary poets and indeed to Harpur himself on other occasions. Not the least of its wonders is the magical way in which Harpur is able to use the word ‘Jesus’ - conventionally (“Jesus pity me a sinner”), realistically (“Jesus take me out of here”) and even profanely (“Jesus I must sound the warning”) - to characterise what has become of religion in the West.

The protagonist, who does not seem to be based on any specific person, is a sick “servant of God’s servants”, period unspecified. In his sickness, which may or may not be wholly emotional, he suffers fever and “the demons of the night”. Here all is panic, all upside-down and a prosecutor comes who may even be Jesus himself: “My life’s meaning,” this voice says, “my life’s blood… you drained to death/And turned it into personal power”. In other words, human consciousness has matured too long to have any further need for, or toleration of, an intermediating priestly caste. Faced with this charge, the protagonist can only blame God, who sends him a memory of his mother. She, widowed, has turned to the via contempliva he himself fantasizes about and has a chilling report: “I am exhausted crying out for help / My throat is dry, my eyes are dim / Through looking for the Lord…”

The traditional disciplines are no longer of any use to her, or to him. Yet her truth drives him to worse error, and to the Führerprinzip itself - “Your duty is sacrosanct!.. The starving must obey the law/The dying must obey the law/Challenging authority/Condemns them all to burn”. However, the authority is no longer legitimate. We no longer need to hear voices telling us what to do, we can reason instead. Words no longer come as oracles, but as the product of thoughts. Who cannot accept what is gained, what is lost by this sea-change, is as lost in hell as the protagonist. God is indeed wholly other.

If a loving understanding of the mother offers no relief, there is only one place left to turn: the character’s father “always taciturn/escaping life within his room” and an occasion, perhaps the only occasion, when he noticed his son and smiled at him and “I felt lightened, lifted, blessed / Embarrassed by my longing for affection”. And it is from this recognition that one may have, usually does have, a whole slew of emotions at once, and that it isn’t necessary, it certainly isn’t desirable, wilfully to select one as in any sense truer than another, however much it stands to reason one couldn’t be experiencing them both at once - from this comes a resolving voice: “You must begin the letting go / You have accomplished all you could…”

And as “the fountainhead/Of solar light” approaches ‘The glory leaves the darkened temple” and at last he understands:

Our ship begins to leave the port
Cuts through the open sea to start
Its voyage to a far-off land...

Harpur’s genius has, in this poem, produced the answer to The Waste Land that Eliot was himself incapable of. It remains only for the rest of us to catch up, and catch on.