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

Manifold magazine.
99 Vera Avenue, Grange Park, London N21 1RP. £12.00 4 issues, £3.50 single issue.


In her editorial to Manifold 47 Vera Rich sternly takes to task the egotism of poets who write in the first person, feeling that unless they are love poems, such work is solely therapeutic and should 'be left to the discreet oblivion of the therapist's casebook'.  She differentiates between this poetry and first person poems where the 'I' is a persona and not the poet's direct experience.  This is an issue that comes up again and again.   It is not always possible to know whether a poem in the first person is a fictional dramatic monologue or the poet's direct life.  It isn't always as obvious as in Browning's My Last Duchess.  My feeling is that it doesn't matter whether the poet is 'in some sense apart from one's everyday self' as Vera Rich puts it, or writing out of direct experience.  If the poem works well, that is the point.  Sylvia Plath's late poems were directly from life experience, though transmuted to works of art and we would be poorer without her work. Manifold has a lively presentation, with 'Letters and Queries', reviews - some of prose work, reports of events - 'Roundabout' - and generously-packed collection of poems in varying styles, including translations beside the original text of poetry in Hungarian, Latin and Belarusian. There is the impassioned and patently autobiographical A Wren's Story, by Rosemary Merry who, sadly, died some months ago and will be missed in the poetry world and the intriguing Poldhu by Caroline Gill, which has an offbeat angle on organisation and dots. Michael Pickering's Venezia Regina Refix is in a cleverly constructed experimental form. It is impossible to give satisfactory extracts because of the layout of interchangeable lineation and spaces, but fine images can be conveyed, such 'As the key changes sounds will soften, / the national tongue like a communion / wafer like local wine...'. A surreal poem by Bob Newman is pleasing: '...river lines brick road / fever ribbon flags peril / press chrome jack hammer' (from Through a Prism Brightly)