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

When Don Paterson became Poetry Editor at Picador, the effect was rather like a newly promoted football team recruiting a famous ex-pro as manager (or a young player-manager - well, playing for Faber - or maybe this comparison is dying on its feet). It was apparent that their editor’s reputation and unsettled contemporaries would guarantee the Picador list would soon become a kind of ‘dream team’, full of already established names. All this was no doubt helped by the relegation of the Oxford Poets and the subsequent dispersal of their squad.

Thus Picador are publishing, or soon to publish, the likes of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy, Ciaran Carson, Sean O’Brien, Michael Donaghy and Kathleen Jamie. Long seen in Scotland as one of our finest poets, Jamie was always going to be one of the first names on Paterson’s wish list. She first appeared with a pamphlet while at Edinburgh University, and later published her first slim volume The Way We Live in 1987 with Bloodaxe. She was 25. Since then and before Jizzen, apart from travel books and collaborative miscellanies, the excellent The Queen at Sheba was her only other full length collection. With an epigraph, “this one’s for the folks at home”, The Queen of Sheba involved various forensic critiques of modern Scotland.

Jizzen, in many ways a step on from this, is itself noticeably under 50 pages and has its fair share of very short poems. Her relatively modest output is strange in that she is someone who never seems to have struggled through any crises of subject particularly of what a woman poet should or should not be writing about.

Range is far from everything, and many of the best poets are restricted in their themes, but Jamie does have a natural reach which surpasses most of her contemporaries and the most accomplished free verse line, in terms of texture, of any British poet under 40. The first thing one remarks upon when reading a Jamie poem is the confident rise to her voice, an authoritative approach to her subjects. In this tone of address, and the structures of her free verse, she demonstrates the influence of American poetry on many Scottish writers. A key poem in Jizzen, Forget It may explore both bad history and a peculiarly Scottish reticence, but it is the execution of the poem which distinguishes it from what a descendant of Edward Thomas and Larkin would follow:

History in a new scheme. I stretch
through hips, ribs, oxter, bursting
the cuff of my school shirt, because
this, Mr Hanning, is me.
Sir! Sir! Sir!’
- he turns, and I claim
just one of these stories,
razed places, important as castles,
as my own. Mum!

We done the slums today...

Jamie’s use of free verse is particularly skilful here and the poem’s fractured narrative of poverty and lowered expectations unfolds with a hurtling sensation, a visionary compression of scenes and voices.

The poems in Jizzen (meaning childbed in Scots) are nonetheless tendered with a more restrained focus than those in The Way We Live or The Queen of Sheba. The central theme of the collection is made clear with the Ultra-sound sequence, via The Barrel Annunciation, as Jizzen is concerned with origins, and the birth of a child provides the happy heart to this. The sequence’s finest poem is the foetal lullaby Bairnsang, one of Jamie’s occasional forays into Scots, and it demonstrates her mastery of sound in the language:

Peedie wee lad
               saumon, siller haddie
gin ye could rim
ye’d rim richt easy-strang
ower causey an carse,
but ye cannae yet rin
sae maun jist courie in
and fashna, fashna, Macrahanish Sand...

The concept of origins is also thrown into relief through poems on the Scottish diaspora, particularly In Canada. Even a poem on Rhododendrons, ubiquitous to both the Highlands and Edinburgh’s genteel back gardens, points out their alien source “Yunnan / or Himalayan earth / settled with them”.

This turn in thematic aspect emerges logically from the collection’s opening three set-pieces. Crossing the Loch is a truly gorgeous evocation of a night-time passage, charged with intensity, and yet the poem’s protagonists are only rowing from the pub’s “swinging doors” to the “cottage/on the sickle-shaped bay”. The Graduates suggests that native Scots are themselves “emigrants of no farewell”, estranged from their past and left with only “our bit language/in jokes and quotes”. Forget It emphasises this, and in its history lesson alludes to those who left for other shores. Once in Canada, however, the poet encounters the remnants of an impoverished reality; that found by the immigrants themselves. It is summed up with characteristic forthrightness and metaphoric concision at the end of Suitcases:

…I remember how each held a wraith
of stale air, and how the assistant seemed

taken aback by my accent;
by then though, I was headed for home,
bored and already pregnant.

And hence we come back to the living origin, as childbirth counterpoints the dilapidated and collapsed channels to the past which other poems probe. The cohesion of the collection can be seen in the way in which Jamie melds the personal and political, so that a sense of the a ‘new’ devolved Scotland is genuinely captured. Coincidental or not, the lyrics of Ultra-sound capture the sweetness of a moment more than personal, a poise at the brink which is echoed elsewhere: in the sly allegory of Interregnum for example, or the two line poem for the new Scottish Parliament Building - “an upturned boat / - a watershed”.

In this ability to deal with the ‘big’ subjects, we see Jamie’s power, the natural reach mentioned earlier, which allows a full exploration within lyric forms. There is never any stiltedness of thought or phrasing. It is a power as organic as the Meadowsweet which grows in the final poem of Jizzen, and which thankfully continues to flourish.