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

Sylvia Kantaris introduces this volume as ‘access to one of America’s outstanding poets’, and indeed I welcome lines like ‘a murder of crows rails over us as if we were grain’, or ‘the pigmy heads of coconuts’: they suggest someone who loves writing and seeks le mot juste. Moreover the lines are folded into complete statements.

     At the same time, apart from art she has nothing to offer but despair: ‘we are closer to undoing ; she can see nothing but ‘tin hope’ ill the gods; and the (too-easily-accepted?) disappearance of the divine means the loss of ‘each other…Next, oursleves’. She grasps the tragic beauty in this, with a fine rhetoric

What we have made is first history, then ruins
On which the butterfly-children of Quetzalcoatl perch
And travellers climb.
        In a shudder the foal becomes a sway-back nag,
        Head slumped to grass…

But, reaching round for some hope not tin, all she can find, even italicising it (probab1y because a quotation from Anaxagoras), is that old chestnut, the conservation of matter:

For nothing dies.
But different changes give their various forms.

     Yet this is a very sprightly song of despair: the will to live is still producing some spanking flowing rhythms and snappy ways of putting it: there is almost a celebration of mutability and decay:

Our children bury us before we’re dead,
stopping our cries with earth,
saying, ‘there, there,’ and ‘it had to be
sooner or later,’ thinking in a year or two
we’d raise flowers for them to pick.

But, though feeding the daisies, the parents are not quite ‘underground’:

We lie in each other’s arms, fond
as the living, still hearing birdsong,
still seeing pinpricks of stars.

Her pagan feeling of spring and birth as violent sacrifices is nurtured by her familiarity with the tradition of poetry:

Pain and desire open all flesh,
as Orestes opened Clytemnestra.

But this poet is liable to correct the ancient wisdom, which says ‘As above, so below’: she says ‘Above remains above, below, below.’ This is in the context of prayers that don’t work for ‘the numberless slain unblanketed’, while we make nursery foods in a world of Soweto, Belfast and Beirut dead. ‘Above’ is imaginary.

     ‘There is nothing / that doesn’t bear looking into.’ This is a strong-minded woman who believes she’s staring hard at reality and knows how to distinguish it fiom the Fanciful. ‘Though one might think the universe is more interesting than she thinks, one reads on completely confident of her grip on adjective, phrase, cadence, eloquence. Giacometti’s thin men stalk pointlessy back and forth on her cover, in varying degrees of confidence and depression.