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

RINA’S WAR by Julian Stannard. 75pp, £7.95,
Peterloo Poets, The Old Chapel, Sand Lane, Calstock, Cornwall. PL18 9QX.
AFTER SHAKESPEARE by Desmond Graham.
80pp, £7.50, Flambard, Stable Cottage, East Fourstones, Hexham, Northumberland. NE47 5DX.
AT THE WATERS’ CLEARING by Nigel McLoughlin.
64pp, £7.00, Flambard.
CONSTANT LEVEL OF ILLUMINATION by Donald Atkinson.
67pp, £6.95, Arc Pubs, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Rd, Todmorden, Lancs. OL14 6DA.

Scanning the contents of Julian Stannard’s collection I noticed a poem titled, ‘Chet Baker’ and hoped it may be elegiac or offer a glimpse of insight into the man. Reading it I felt mildly let down, a feeling which persisted throughout the book. Sometimes it is just an inappropriate simile, as in ‘Bob’s Coat’, which is ‘clinging / onto my back like a pyramid’. What? It happens again in ‘1919’ where, ‘all the tensions / of the Great War sighed out like afternoon sleep.’ In ‘San Giuliano’ he uses ‘and’ three times in two lines. This is slack writing. And how can the ‘sun’ even metaphorically, be ‘strong enough / to break a back’? The locations, Genoa and environs, may at times seem interesting but the writing itself is anaemic and projects little sense of life or lived experience.

At least Desmond Graham’s collection is a livelier affair, planting Shakespeare’s characters in Newcastle, creating metamorphoses and offering some interesting interweaving of the real and fictitious. His Kent is a magnanimous children’s benefactor still despised by some for his actions. Mistress Quickly runs a pub with partner, Pistol, dispensing tough and tender love to all-comers including Hamlet and Cressida. Cordelia defends old men who can’t always help themselves. Lear, meanwhile, ‘says nothing’. I liked his portrait of Bottom who ‘writes poetry’ and ‘has a string of garages / down by the Tyne’. His blend of familiar figures and their new urban environment often makes for an interesting poem. I did begin to feel that the idea had been taken far enough after a while and I went in search of something different. Nevertheless, I would return to this collection.

The ‘something different’ I picked up was Nigel McLoughlin’s collection. He treads some familiar ground in dealing with common experiences ; relationships, a sense of place and family ties, but occasionally he turns a fresh perspective, as in ‘Kilmakerrill’. This is a chilling depiction of a landscape, a burial ground with ‘no church / To stand over it’ where ‘no God gazes down’. It is a bleak, compelling evocation of place. His ‘Two Songs’, after Berryman, are less successful, perhaps because they invite comparison with those of the American poet. They read too much like exercises to me.

He also does himself no favours by using near cliché such as, ‘We warmed winter with a kiss’ (‘On Rosnowlagh Beac’) but redeems this with some muscular re-working of the Irish in ‘The Yellow Bittern’ and ‘The Green Man’. And in ‘Subjects’ he presents an unadorned glimpse of the artist sketching the fiddler whose ‘high colour’ suggests either the ‘effort of playing’ or her awareness of ‘being sketched’. The language has a lightness of touch that makes this poem all the more memorable.

Another Irish connection is made by Donald Atkinson’s work in the final sequence of his book. ‘Poems For Music’ were inspired by the ‘beauty of traditional slow airs from the West of Ireland’ and the first poem in this set uses repetition and variation of phrase to simulate the music’s own phrasing. It is always a difficult task, the setting of new words to music, and in this case a music we, as listeners, can’t hear. But again, it is the lightness of the words that allow rhythm to predominate and carry the spirit of these pieces. There is further evidence of this in ‘As The Very Rocks Themselves’, seven pieces which have also been set to music and now stand as an elegy to four fishermen drowned crossing the Sound of Iona in 1998. The narrative laments people and place. It adapts elements from traditional folk-song, concluding with images of desolation and destruction:

Down-fallen the stone wall, in the ben of the blacksmith.
The fire is gone out now, gone out, and the hearth cold.
Broken the mill wheel, by the rush of the burn.
And broken the wings of the swan, on the bright wire.

This poetry does speak of experience and it remains in the memory, which is, perhaps, all I can ask.