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

     The outpouring of public grief at the death of the Oxford University Press poetry list was entirely understandable. The miserable language and weaselly marketing speak used by the grandees of the OUP to articulate and to defend the decision only made matters worse. But now that the dust has settled on the affair and the sounds of high-toned outrage have died away it is perhaps possible to draw some conclusions – and not necessarily ones in which poetry lovers (or do I mean luvvies?) can find comfort.

     Firstly, the rough beheading of the OUP list finally puts an end to the nonsense that began with the Poetry Society’s “New Generation” marketing initiative: the claim that there was a poetry boom and that poetry was the new rock and roll. There is no poetry boom, as a quick glance at the sales figures of a new book by any poet of reputation will show. There are more bouncers at a Stones concert than readers of a new Faber or Bloodaxe book. And the point about rock and roll was that people actually went out and bought those vinyl Elvis Presley records in their millions. In the latest issue of the bulletin of the Welsh Academy a prominent Welsh poet suggests that given the fact that no one is reading the books, it is “crucial” that poets get themselves invited to public readings: “This is how their work is seen and heard.” Perhaps the OUP was in the vanguard after all and the public event will replace the book.

     Another consequence of the OUP affair is that a rather harsh and unnatural light has been cast over the poets on its list. The distinguished elders (Porter, Fisher, Tomlinson) can look after themselves but the newer voices, suddenly exposed to a cold wind no one would wish them to feel fanning their cheeks, are the crux of the argument. What is it that the great and good have been rushing to defend and exactly how vital is this work? Such questions, in the normal course of events, would not be asked. The typical Oxford book is slim and elegant and unfussed (not like those roaring boys and girls at Bloodaxe with their poetry-with-an-edge). Its authors are not used to being shoved brusquely into the limelight and asked to give an account of themselves and explain why they should not be sacked. It’s all so indecorous.

     Jo Shapcott (rumoured to have been snapped up by Faber) describes her new book in the poetry Book Society Bulletin as “quiet”. In spite of being labelled in the literature for the forthcoming Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival as “a literature activist” (and only subsequently as a poet), Shapcott is right. Her new book, her third, does not come at us whirling the bloodcurdling instrument of Eric Bloodaxe. Famously the winner of the National Poetry Competition twice, Shapcott displayed in her debut, Electroplating the Baby (1988), a light, deft touch and a quirky surrealism (of the whimsical English rather than the in-your-face Barcelonan kind). Her next book, Phrase Book (1992) was a Poetry Book Society Choice, as indeed is her latest.

     For me this book was too damned quiet, and in spite of Shapcott’s eminence in the poetry world and the over-excited prose of the PBS selectors I was disappointed, having genuinely enjoyed her first collection. Part of the trouble, I think, lies in that surrealist fancy which is at constant risk of foundering on the banks of whimsy. The little animal poems of which Shapcott has always been fond are prevalent in the new book, but what exactly are we to make of ‘Hedgehog’?

The road is slick
in the rain
and good slugs
can be nuzzled
out of shadows
under hedgerows.

I understand.

It’s plain
you can’t hurry across
even when those other lights
come at you
preceding
the hurtling mountain.

This seems to me merely flat and lifeless, not quiet but imbued with the vigour of Monty Python’s parrot. There are too many poems in the volume like this, wan and unaffecting, insufficiently bold in imagination or feeling to animate or engage the reader.

     A sequence of poems based loosely on Rilke’s sequence ‘Les Roses’ looks as though it might be more promising. Twenty one short poems (all but one consisting of two paired, unrhymed quatrains) meditate on love from the point of view of the woman who assumes the persona of the rose in order gently to rebuke and educate her lover. They are delicately done in their way but I am baffled by the adjective “searing” deployed (again by those PBS selectors) to describe this would-be erotic sequence:

XIV
Summer: for a few days
you lay around with us
breathed in pollen,
counted aphids,

watched us drop
one by one on to the path
where the scent
was especially heady.

The best poems in this book are where Shapcott wakes up from her life asleep and writes with more address. The opening poem, ‘Thetis’ (the shape-changing goddess whose offspring, Achilles, was the product of rape) is an obvious feminist parable (“No man can frighten me...forced to bring forth War”) that is told with the poet’s lithe and easy fluency with narrative. The brief dramatic monologues like ‘Mrs Noah: Taken After the Flood’ rather than the animal and vegetable vignettes are the more interesting of these short poems. ‘Lovebirds’ shows that Shapcott can move us if she chooses. But overall, I felt this was a collection that, representing six years’ work, was simply too quiet for its own good, that, in the end, wasn’t trying hard enough.