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

   Her first book. A quiet voice and a sure one. No desperate writhings, no crippling doubt, no basking in uncertainty. Moreover a voice, damn her, achieved without apparent agony of effort. A blithe spirit, serene and unhurried in her way but maybe, beneath the surface, paddling like fury. Nothing shows but calm, wry, interested observation, a quirky sense of humour. No politics, little religion, no deep spiritual yearnings, no rage. Above all, no moralities, no polemics, no solutions. Her poems are not self-contained or forbidding. She doesn’t insist. Rather she invites participation.

   Her technique is painterly and cinematographic (there must be an easier word). She builds up her narrative often in couplets ending in a full stop, followed by a double space, then another couplet or single line and a full stop: In Learning to Read, for instance:

With a red tin spade
I hacked and shovelled for Earth’s core.
The clay sides of my craters crumbled
so I searched out treasure.
Mad for bits of blue, I sifted:
poison-glass sapphires
sky-coloured crocks

willow-pattern jigsaws….

   What she is doing is page-turning, illustrating, sketching out the story-board of her vision. She is a born editor. What she leaves out is amazing. My guess is that she looks at art as often as she reads poems, that she is more excited by film than by novels. Like an artist, she makes marks on paper and both the tools for the job and the paper itself are deliciously sensuous and sacred. Colour, sound, texture, smell, feel….these are the basics of her palette. Nor are we talking brash acrylics. Ground lapis, more like, for her Book of Hours. And fine inks for calligraphy.

   Some ten poems take us back to childhood. Dad was a welder (master of the indigo flame). In Blacksmith, she visits him in his
workshop:

The shed is shadowy with carbon fur.
A girder screams through saw’s teeth
………………………………………
Swarf scuffs under my sandal.
I sniff hot iron, wait for his mask to drop,

claim my thruppence,
run back into the street.

   Other poems see her observing teenage behaviour with intense, almost jealous detachment, filled with the memory of her own adolescence (but also with a teacher’s love of youth) From August:

Young men snap saplings,
whip flaps of bark,
stropping up nerve
………………………
They fence,
parry,
scourge sweat,
light the sticks
stoke fires with catalogues
and vodka.

   Or, from Rain, following a description of two young skateboarders caught awkward-kissing in a shower of rain:

Air’s astringent as aftershave
with nettles and flowering lime.
Gutter gossip roars in downpipes.

She has a genius for creating an image to encapsulate a feeling:
From Introduction to County Mayo:

I sat very still so no-one would see
my jumper unravelling

From Spoil Tip

I’ve stopped map-reading,
can’t see for hurt.
A slipped remark set me drifting….

And how’s this for sure brushstroke, from Camping on Achill
Island:

County Mayo trips the whole Atlantic over its doorstep.
Most sail away from this diluted land
except the fishermen
in their peat-black currachs
spilling starfish in the harbour.

She is unsentimental, unpretentious, never mawkish, never the
slightest bit swamped with self-pity, nor ever less than clear. Only in
one poem do the floodgates open, in the first three verses of Elegy for a Bird:

Forsythia’s crestfallen
casting ragged yellow
for green.

Slate-smooth in my hands
I set you in a magnolia boat
amongst grey shales.

Celandines will spread hearts
over you and yield to yarrow
then spark again next Spring.

   It’s beautiful. I get fed up with reading poetry I cannot understand written by poets who do not wish me to read their scrawly hand. Clarity doesn’t mean ‘simplicity’ in a negative sense. It sometimes actually means the shit has been rejected. It is a pleasure to read the work of a poet who invites me into her eyes rather than clobbering me with introspection. More please.