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

The Year’s Afternoon, Douglas Dunn, Faber £7.99 &
Perfect Catch, Ian McMillan, Carcanet £6.95

These two poets, both honoured in their own countries, both in their middle years doing some stock-taking, seem to approach their writing from opposite corners of the known universe. Dunn eschews the poetry circuit -

...Who’d be a sixty year old jerk
In jeans and leather going from hall to hall
With book in hand, and upping up the fee,
Reciting yourself, from Falkirk to Walsall?

McMillan’s wonderfully at home on the poetry terraces, touring, making exhibitions with his mates, writing occasional poetry. It’s lovely to read the two collections together because, though their style and personality are so dissimilar, they each celebrate friends, loved ones and places with such astonishing tenderness and self-ironizing awareness, that the double shot of a poetry of celebration is as good as a double shot of vodka, and better than cocaine. Better than other stimulants because, though they also give an immediate high, they both delve also into loss and memory, and the question of how much can be rescued and brought back by poetry - this from ‘A Plastic Garden’ - a McMillan poem about Mexico City:

...those children
playing in that plastic garden,
that grass, greener than any grass,
those children, more real
than any children.

     And this, from ‘East Riding’ - Douglas Dunn:

Some landscapes never change, because they stay
Unvisited as too significant
For a return, and must remain the same.
A stern but loved voice warns me off with
‘Don’t’
And I obey it, drawing back from shame
To tell myself, ‘No, don’t ever go back.
Just let it be the way
It was ‘- life-beaten, off the beaten track -’ ’

Both poets draw back from trying to describe, and yet they do try, they can’t help it, because poetry is another room, where significant moments that could be tarnished or dishonoured if they were kicked around in bright sunshine can be kept safely, and their bloom preserved. Because you wouldn’t kick around a ripe plum in the city square, would you? Which thought leads me to hope that McMillan will allow himself to become a little less, and Dunn a little more, public. Because, as E.A. Markham has said, audiences can pull a poet forward, expecting more virtuosity, but can also pull him back, expecting more virtuosity. The dark background is always calling, as is the descent into lights, and the matador’s suit of lights.