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

Matt Simpson is a poet who has been denied by the critical establishment the standing he deserves (he receives no mention, for example, in Ian Hamilton’s Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry). One of the reasons for this neglect might be the fact that he has, since the publication of his first full-length book, Making Arrangements, in 1982, written from and very largely about his Merseyside background, risking being labelled narrowly ‘provincial’ by the metropolitan literary cognoscenti. Another reason could be that in these times of post-modern insistence on the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning, syntactical and narrative disjunction, calculated incoherence and so on, his direct clarity of expression has been regarded as lack of ‘seriousness’. The truth is that, at their best, his poems of childhood recollection, small domestic dramas, love, life and death in working-class Liverpool carry a universality of significance that is found only in the finest poetry of its kind. Reading the poems in Getting There about uncles, aunts, grandparents, marriages and deaths is rather like exploring an old family album except that the pictures, sad, wistful or comic, also come with voices and tunes. Not that all of them are concerned with personal matters. There is a brief but wonderfully effective poem on Hiroshima, pared-down, chiselled and poignant, and a longer but equally moving piece about the submarine, ‘Thetis’, which was lost on 16th June, 1939, with its crew of ninety-nine men.

     In ‘Hiroshima’ Simpson doesn’t attempt to generalise about this ethically dubious military and historical event but focuses on one innocent and relatively insignificant victim and, daringly and successfully, writes in the first person as the young actress of “the famous Cherryblossom Theatre”.

     I was less taken with the few descriptive and anecdotal Greek Island poems though that is probably because they seem flimsy against the warm, rich solidity of the Merseyside pieces.