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

Mandy Coe has a nice way with the downbeat, piling up pictures of humdrum lives in bleak conditions. In one poem she neatly describes a working area where women routinely pack things in boxes:

It was the size of a football pitch,
windowless against the clock of the sky.
Time moved in slow shifts; one-week contracts
and blue check overalls, unbuttoning
or buttoning up. On dusty iron chains
hung fluorescent lights, stripping make-up
laid over bad rows and good nights.

The way to survive this kind of environment is to switch off, so that one woman, asked a question, is slow to respond because she’s “miles away”. And she adds, “If I was here I’d go mad”. Other poems are set on buses , in the streets where dead cats lie in the gutter and old people collapse on the pavement, and even in the male toilets where the narrator enters by mistake and sees “those funny sinks/ halfway down the wall”. Not all of this adds up to first-rate poetry, and it doesn’t lead to great conclusions about life or art, but it’s gritty and real and very readable.

     But I don’t want to make it seem that Mandy Coe can only write about a kind of depressed, though not depressing, ordinariness. She has poems which look back to childhood experiences, as in ‘Theatre of Shadows’, where she recalls being pushed on stage to face an audience of other children and adults:

You pray: Please let me get it right.
Or at least
let me get it so wrong
people will think it’s funny.

     And she writes about being in New York as Baghdad is bombed, and:

At TV World, the shop window pulses
- luminous green explosions
silhouetting the skyline of Baghdad.
Live, the news cuts to the US President.
Countless images of him mouth silently,
his postures a careful balance of duty and regret.

     There are a few inconsequential poems in this collection but they don’t hold back the general thrust, which is generous and dedicated to dealing with a world which isn’t perfect but is all we’ve got.