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

This introductory volume from a series of planned biennial anthologies is bursting at the seams with talent, as I am with excitement at having read it. There are eleven poets featured here. Most of them are already established but some are in the throes of making their debut. But that is to make them sound like film stars or pop stars which is something the editors happily don’t attempt. The Poetry School, which - it has to be said - is growing from strength to strength, offers a wide range of courses and readings in a variety of settings in London and has a deserved reputation for its application to crafting in poetry. The emphasis is not on the inspired moment or the ‘born poet’, but on technique and drafting. In ‘Tying the Song’, each author has prefaced their work with comments on different aspects of the writing process or on their creative development, which provide an interesting background. It’s a refreshingly serious approach that I’m sure will hook an equally serious readership, and following.
But, if that all sounds too heavy, the poems themselves will send you reeling with the pleasure that’s to be had from all this seriousness. There’s the delicious upbeat musicality of Scott Verner: (from The Study of Air)

I can’t rightly say
     when I commenced the study of air
                  but likely on the far side
of learning to tie my shoes
    as one skill seems
         the left hand of the other...

Katherine Frost’s superb lineation that so exactly, in Elizabeth Bishop’s phrase, portrays ‘a mind thinking’; Peter Daniels’ mischievous, but sensitive humour; Roger Moulson’s unusual viewpoints; Kate Ling’s eye for telling detail; Blair Gibb’s deep humanity and story-telling energy; the fresh notebook qualities of Sharon Morris’s sonnet sequence; Martha Kapos’s strange and effective animism of the world of objects; John Hayne’s rich sense of anecdote and craftsmanship that remind me of Carcanet’s Andrew Waterman; Helen Farish’s clean, emblematic language, and my favourite, Greta Stoddart, whose ability to keep an emotional ambivalence at work in her writing makes it utterly compelling: (from ‘The Fitter’ - a poem about a man who fits the glass eyes of stuffed animals):

... Recently
though, a slip in concentration perhaps -
an upright grizzly in the Natural History

has the eyes of a man stranded in his front room,
the telly blizzarding, the fire gone dead...