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

Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Pushkin Press £7.00.

David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism, Enitharmon £8.95.

Jim Burns, Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals, Trent Books £7.99.

Keith Douglas, The Letters, Carcanet £14.95.

William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems II 1939-1962, Carcanet £12.95

Christopher Middleton, Faint Harps and Silver Voices: Selected Translations, Carcanet £18.95.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus with Letters to a Young Poet, Carcanet £9.95.

John Gallas, Resistance Is Futile, Carcanet £8.95.

Nikolay Gumilyov, The Pillar of Fire, Selected Poems, Anvil £12.95.

Atar Hadari, Songs from Bialik, Selected Poems of Hayim Nahman Bialik, Syracuse (price not visible).

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, and Men in the Off Hours, both Cape Poetry, both £10.00.

Peter Porter, A King’s Lynn Suite, The King’s Lynn Poetry Festival £6 (Standard edition) £35 (Luxury collector’s edition, hardback).

Ambit as ever is receiving well over a thousand volumes of poetry a year, mainly books but some pamphlets. It’s very difficult for us to sort through them and decide which ones to review but we do our best. On the whole we don’t review prose, but of course there is always interesting material coming in. Let’s start with a quick mention of some of it.

     Watch out for the Pushkin Press, which is republishing neglected European classics. The books have a nice and curious format but very handy, and include people like Italo Svevo, Soren Kierkegaard and Stephan Zweig. I’ve just read his Letter from an Unknown Woman, a novella which as Pushkin said is of distorted passion and “a rendition of the strengthened madness of love”, but many of their other titles are also worth getting hold of.

     Enitharmon publishes prose from time to time, apart from their admirable poetry list, and recently they’ve reprinted David Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism, first published in 1935 and not to be missed if you haven’t read it. There is a useful introduction about the circumstances of the book by Michel Remy.

     Trent Books have recently put out Jim Burns’ piece Beats, Bohemians and Intellectuals. Burns is one of the people who years ago introduced me to many American writers I hadn’t heard of at that time, with his short pragmatic reviews. Other things too in this good collection of Burns are his accounts of Little magazines.

     For the last piece of prose, Carcanet (sometimes a bit Eng. Lit. for me) have published Keith Douglas’s Letters, providing a vivid account of his too short life as a poet and a soldier in the Second World War.

Carcanet are as active as ever on the poetry scene: they’ve just reissued William Carlos Williams’ collected poems in a new edition, astonishing value for those who are not familiar with his work. Start with Journey to Love, which is in the second volume, a collection Williams put out in 1955. It includes ‘Asphodel That Greeny Flower’, one of the best love poems of the last century.

     Carcanet have always been strong on translations and have recently published Christopher Middleton’s Selected Translations in a volume called Faint Harps and Silver Voices. Middleton translates from all the main European languages and also from Arabic and Turkish, and he seems to have an incredible eye for spotting poems which would translate well. I don’t entirely like the way of organising the book thematically - groupings like Memory and Thresholds hardly seem to work, but virtually all the poems do, so it doesn't matter. It includes lots of poets that at least you will have heard of, if not read, from Rilke to Tristan Tzara, but also splendid little poems by people I’ve certainly never heard of: a 12th century love poem ‘Drunken Beauty’ by Ibn az-Zaqqaq and ‘The Housemaids’ on the previous page by Oktay Rifat. One of Middleton’s skills is that, unlike some of his rival translators, he actually gives each poet something distinctive so you don’t have the feel, as you so often do in a mixed anthology of translations, that you are not reading words of the original but of the translator. Here, through Middleton’s own distinctive voice, you hear strongly the ‘Silver Voices’ of the poets he is translating.

     Also from Carcanet on the translation front Sonnets to Orpheus and Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. The letters to a young poet are particularly fascinating.

John Gallas is a New Zealander who came to this country in 1971, always interesting, his latest book from Carcanet is Resistance Is Futile. Full of strange things, not always successful, ‘Bush’ just went on for too many pages for me and I couldn’t stay with it but ‘The Ballad of Robin Hood and the Deer’ is splendid and I like as well ‘Christmas Message from the Vatican received through an Iron’ and more.

     The strongest recent publication from Anvil is The Pillar of Fire, Selected Poems, by Nikolay Gumilyov. As ever, splendid Anvil production with a very informative introduction by Michael Basker. Gumilyov is the Acmeist poet who married Akhmatova. There is a substantial presentation of his works here “I don’t like the languor/ of your crossed arms,/ your calm modesty/ and bashful fear”. Is that Akhmatova? There is a lot of development in his work despite his short life – he was shot in August 1921, just after completing his last book The Pillar of Fire, which indeed has splendid poems in it. It has to be said that all are outclassed by Akhmatova’s Epilogue poems on or about Nikolay Gumilyov but still this is a book one really wants to possess.

     Atar Hadari has translated the poems of Bialik, a Hebrew poet who was born in Lithuania in 1873 and who gave up writing poetry quite early on. Many of these poems, mostly about family, are very good, and put very metrically by Hadari (whose own poems have recently appeared in Ambit.)

     Anne Carson is in prolific, if not too prolific form, a little sparceness would not go amiss. I couldn’t get involved with the Autobiography of Red, based on the red monster named Geryon. The myth just didn’t sustain this long poem in my view. Better is her Men in the Off Hours, still  with massive allusions to other writers. Pound comes to mind as one reads. There are titles like ‘TV Men: Akhmatova’ or ‘Lazarus Standup: Shooting Script’. Of all the TV Men included, I like Tolstoy best: “He was more or less repulsive to himself,/ the little satin parts especially”. Watch out for Carson’s next collection – hopefully it will be less allusive and more in her own distinctive voice.

Finally the Kings Lynn Festival are annually inviting a poet to write a book for them. Peter Porter is the first and his A King’s Lynn Suite is full of pleasing lyric accounts of Kings Lynn, with splendid portraits of some of the people who have been around there over the centuries. The suite was written just before 2000, so I’ll end with Porter’s comment on the millennium: “If 2000 seems an extraordinary sheaf of years, remember the planet has lasted longer than God.”