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

This is an anthology with an exciting aim and a welcome eclecticism. The editors have staked out their territory, which is among the bizarre and unorthodox in all its forms. Their preference is for poetry that “strikes from new and surprising angles, proposes unconventional connections, or takes on extraordinary subject matter”. Looking back to the mid-50s and forward to the new millennium, they have sought out work from all over the world that responds subversively to an age when the individual has so often been crushed by state brutality or left reeling by the pace of scientific advance. The poems articulate this disorientation and propose antidotes to it - through irony, quirky surrealistic humour or the use of myth, ancient or modern, drawing on the contemporary fables of cinema or science fiction.

The title poem, Emergency Kit, by the Nigerian, Tanure Ojaide, is an allegory of a man who visits a strange people, taking with him objects he thinks essential to his safety. It is typical of the half-serious, half-playful tone of many of the poems:

When I find myself among a laughing tribe
I know they hide something from me;
I conjure up a laughing box whose button I press
To outlaugh them all. As long as they hear their music
They leave me free...

Kafka is the presiding spirit of this collection and one of his drawings is used as a striking cover. Other main reference points are Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney and Charles Simic. The last, an American of Serbian origin, provides five poems of bleak, sardonic intensity and an epigraph which inspires the second part of the book’s title: “This strange century / With its slaughter of the innocent / Its flight to the moon”.

One feature of the anthology which has aroused some criticism is that there is no arrangement by author or chronology. But the editors’ declared aim is to make their book “poem-orientated, not a poets’ league-table”. To that end, poems are linked together by loosely structured and recurrent themes; and this is precisely what makes the volume so intriguing to browse through. The classic topics of birth, copulation and death are interwoven with the depiction of animals, children, space-travel and human cruelty - juxtapositions which allow us to discover unexpected connections and contrasts across cultural and generational divides. Established ‘names’ like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens and Philip Larkin are cheek by jowl with many who may be new to English readers, such as Kojo Gyinye Kyei, Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin and Rita Dove.

Within a given theme, moods change precipitously. Auden, in his sole appearance, offers a disenchanted view of the 1969 space venture:

It’s natural the boys should whoop it up for
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
        it would not have occurred to women
        to think worthwhile...

This is followed immediately by the Nigerian poet, Odia Ofeimun, whose Landing on the Moon ends with an ecstatic cry: “Catch my hand, brother / we are annexing the kingdom of the gods.”

There is a balance between lighter, more ludic work and poems which tackle heavier themes. Even the eccentric and playful may have a serious point. One such ‘find’ is the poem No by Mark Doty who is to be interviewed in Magma 9. This is an eerie meditation on a wood turtle hiding in its shell:

he’s the colour of ruined wallpaper,
of cognac, and he’s closed,
pulled in as though he’ll never come out...
His age…is a room
from which they are excluded.

Political themes are sometimes introduced obliquely, in the form of science fiction parables. George Macbeth’s Bedtime Story narrates the death of the last human being from the viewpoint of mutants who have inherited the earth. Edwin Muir’s The Horses tells movingly of the rebirth of pre-industrial society after a nuclear war, when the horses return “from their own Eden” to find “that long-lost archaic companionship” with man. Here, as elsewhere, to read two poems on a similar theme together is to arrive at a better understanding of both.

Emotions in this volume run the whole gamut from despair at human cruelty to the ecstasies of sexual desire. The ghosts of the Holocaust drift through these pages in Anthony Hecht’s semi-documentary More light! more light! and Michael Longley’s Ghetto which, with its carefully detailed vignettes of deprivation and terror, makes dreadful events imaginable, if not understandable:

The little girl without a mother behaves like a mother
with her rag doll to whom she explains fear and anguish.

Fingers leave shadows on a violin, harmonics,
A blackbird fluttering between electrified fences.

Tony Harrison’s Bright Lights of Sarajevo appears in close proximity though, to my ear, its jingling rhymes do not gain by the comparison.

For such an unconventional and provocative anthology, there is a lack of good love poems. Sex is here in abundance, from Marilyn Hacker - “I’m horny as a timber wolf in heat” - through Heather McHugh - “Coming / is the body’s way / of weeping, after a series of shocks / is suffered” - to Sharon Olds’ Ecstasy with its multiple verbal orgasms. I was about to settle for Adrienne Rich: “That ‘old last act’! / And yet sometimes / all seems post-coitum triste” - when, a page or two further on, I came across Thomas Lynch’s bitter-sweet Maura, who only discovers desire for her husband after his death:

Odd then to have a grief so passionate
it woke her damp from dreams astraddle him -
the phantom embraced in pillows and blankets.

This to my mind is a genuine love poem. More important, it shows that Emergency Kit, and the generous range of work it encompasses, may initially disorientate us even further in these strange times; but eventually helps us begin to find our bearings.