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

I suspect that this small book will not get too wide a circulation nor attract reviews in what people like to think are the right places. I also suspect that Sue Wood is not the kind of poet likely to be featured at literary festivals and the like. And yet her work, though low-key and often concerned with small-scale subjects, has its attractions, not least of which are intelligence and a tidy way with technique. An encounter with an older neighbour neatly evokes a half-forgotten past:

Frank says he remembers fish in a pool
above our wood.
Frank remembers when electricity came here,
when a bomb exploded over Low Moor
and cracked our sill right through, when
the garden grew only rhubarb, when the
                                      trams ran to Shelf.

     Elsewhere, Sue Wood picks up on paintings as subject matter, though it’s significant that she goes for those which focus on intimate personal relationships rather than large-scale historical events. But, to be fair, she’s not blind to the outside world, past or present, and she has a strong poem, ‘The First Morning’, about the onset of foot-and-mouth disease. Like all her work, it doesn’t overstate its case but is still powerful. The same can be said of one which deals with the employment of children in the Yorkshire mills and in which names and ages become their own kind of bleak poetry:

Now here’s the country
all around this stone
and we are dust, nothing but dust.
‘Alice Devitt, aged 12 years.
Elizabeth Edwards, aged 17 years.
John Johnson, aged 12 years.
Sarah Shaw, aged 15 years.’
And Annie and Mary...

     I don’t suppose this will be thought of as important poetry by those who determine these things and yet there is a decency and humanity in it which made me prefer it to much of what I read nowadays.