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

Dog-Days, by Philip Sharpe.
Doazy Bor, by Melville Hardiment.
(Each £1 from Migrant Press, 61 Belmont Road, Malvern, Worcestershire, U.K.)

     Dog-Days is a very ‘self-centred’ collection and revolves exclusively round a preoccupation with the inevitability of death - pitted against which, as you might well imagine, is love and the determination to endure. The collection strikes the tone of stoical perseverance in the face of anxiety. However, Dog-Days makes its points only at the cost of much repetition. Many of the poems seem to be treading for too closely on each other’s heels, frequently striking the same stance, for the reader not to feel that there is a genuine narrowness of perception in the collection. When, for instance, we encounter on the last page, The Nervous Anatomy of Charles Bell, we, not unjustifiably, expect to come away a little wiser about the man himself. But, instead, we are confronted with Philip Sharpe again, who can’t resist the strong “pull/of that warrener, Death”. Bell exists only in so far as he is convenient for the author to look into and paint his own portrait with.

     The section Organ Music, however, presents a slightly different picture. Innards, I feel, conveys what is closest to Sharpe’s heart more effectively than any of the other poems in this collection:

A dark loft, full
of bellows, pipes and stops
where, for a moment,
a mighty music’s heard
to the echo, before
life’s light wind drops,
leaving dust and a space,
as if no-one ever cared
for sound and motion
in that eviscerated air.

Unlike them, it gives a close and careful attention to the object, allowing it to distinguish the writer s concerns, without forcing him to be excessively ‘talky’, as Sharpe is in many of his other poems. The abscence of a monotonous metrical tum tum allows the subject to infiltrate the movement of the language in a way it rarely does in the other poems, and to drive itself, with force, upon the imagination of the reader. In the same section too, water, apart from in line 6 its alliterative heavy-handedness, indicates the most promising direction of the writing in this collection.

     Sharpe, unlike Melville Hardiment, seems a perfect example of the poet who, according to Robert Bly in News of the Universe, “replaces nature with his own body or his consciousness”. (Sharpe, ironically enough, calls one of his sections Sharpe’s Anatomy.)

     Hardiment, in Doazy Bor, writes of the East Anglian fenlands. His focus is a group of characters and a geographical area in which he himself grew up. These are rendered, at times, in an almost breathless rush of things and actions, as if, by the act of naming, the reality itself will be called up. This is both the collection’s weakness and its strength. A weakness in that many of the poems in its sections don’t really impress when isolated, because they don’t have the intense imaginative coherence of individual poems. A strength in that the collection has an accumulative impact, greater than any individual poem could have. Hardiment’ s subject matter, the minutiae of a life (now defunct) lived close to the elements, human and non-human, is vigorous and startling. Like The Great Hunger of Patrick Kavanagh, from whose mouth it almost seems to take the words: “for a village must never come-of-age/but dally through childhood/ into perpetual adolescence”, Doazy Bor is bred from the primacy of a physical reality which stakes its claim upon the language - we are never in danger of any of the sentimentalising propensities of Literature here. Indeed, the reality that unites all these fragments of Hardiment’s is a deeply pervasive force; we constantly see people and things interpenetrating to such a degree that we feel we can rightly talk of ‘one nature’ in the poem, a nature which includes both people and place, and which is reflected in the imagery: “Above the sparse shoulders/pale harvest moon disc/of white drawn flesh”. Indeed, it is in its portraits of people especially, that Doazy Bor provides, I think, an excellent antidote to the spate of rather tired and self-conscious portraits of parents and relations appearing in British magazines at the moment. The writers of such portraits could profit greatly from reading such poems as The Skating Mendicant:

Pale peering eyes traverse
past frontiers of old hungers:
Idle muscles fall from fustian sleeves
scarred by the wounds
of unemployment -
too much for the kitchen
turned out at daybreak
with bread and lard bait
his peeled willow-wand flickering
before him as he glides
shallow ice thinning on fen dykes
and from his neck
suspended on a leather thong
his begging box inscribed
HELP THE BLIND

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