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

Jeremy Page’s poems are tinged with a feeling of nostalgia that, when combined with their modest use of language and functional application of form, give them a low-key air. They are reflections rather than statements and the reader needs to accept the poet’s aim not to step outside a certain framework in order to get something from them. It would be a mistake to expect the poems to do more than they can.

     Sometimes the nostalgia is for things the poet didn’t even experience, as in ‘All the Young Men’, where he thinks of a generation he imagines were engaged by politics and Penguin New Writing. He describes the young men and says, “They live plainly and think highly”, whereas he sees himself as doing something less than that:

Born too late,
I can only buy The Guardian,
spurn the latest share issue, flip idly
through a book of verse.

It’s a poem that partly succeeds because of its brevity and its notion of the past does tell us something about the poet. But it may be that he’s on surer ground when writing about people and things he has directly experienced. There’s a good poem about a grandfather that evokes a real rather than an imagined past, and a short one called ‘Bookmark’ that deals with death in a tight, effective way:

After the funeral
the final confirmation:

Beside her bed -
a Catherine Cookson,
bookmark
at page twenty-three.

All the unread pages;
all the pages
she would never
read.

I did wonder if it was really necessary to have “All the unread pages” in the poem, “all the pages/ she would never/ read” saying it in a more personal way and with a better rhythmic impact, but perhaps I’m wrong.

     I don’t think that this book contains any major poetry but it is full of decency and holds to some genuine values of honesty and compassion.