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

Death is no longer “the taboo subject” - but was it ever in poetry, and could it ever have been in the century of world war? Preoccupation with death can imply anything from love of life, Wagnerian erotic ecstasy, religious fervour, the final cure for all pain, to clinical depression.

     This sequence of nine poems by a poet who lives in Germany and therefore used to be better known looks at death in nine witty ways, but death doesn’t alter from the protagonist’s becoming “no-one again and nothing again”, and it will have dominion. The first poem allows some light, even eternity, though there is nothing more than moonlight in this night; but the light will live on without souls. The moon’s “leafless windless silver” will continue but “There is no rhyme for silver”. ‘Death as a Foreign Language’ - “You will die/ he will die/ she will die…” - is “an easy language to learn./ Simple to translate.” But ‘translate’ has no transcendental implications. If the Rhine were the Styx one could take the boat from Bad Godesborg to “the Deadland of Niederdollendorf”, then return; and death - ‘of which we know nothing’ he now admits - would be known.

     Depression seems to be at the heart of these poems. Suicide-weather wraps itself like a sack round the skull. “Let the sockets see.” Life itself is night, though “lit cunningly”: “Her eyes meet his/ his arms hold her.” But sex merely effigies “the final scene”, figures on a tomb. The last line of the sequence is about more than death: life. “This is no place for us.”