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

SOUTH online at the South Bank

We were delighted to learn that SOUTH is among national poetry magazines selected by the South Bank Poetry Library for inclusion in its digitisation project.

Files of this issue and two others have been forwarded to the project manager, Chris McCabe. It is hoped to add them to the site by the end of April. SOUTH will be going online at www.poetrymagazines.org.uk alongside such august titles as Poetry
Review and London Magazine.

We understand that the library will in due course be contacting contributors to seek their consent for the use of copyright material in this form. We hope that they will readily agree and see this as further recognition for SOUTH and its contributors.

The site was launched in 2003 and almost immediately chosen as Site of the Week by the Guardian newspaper. Visitors read more
than 3,000 pages of poetry a month.

Acumen Literary Journal

SOUTH 30 went to press early in September 2004, just too soon to be able to congratulate editor Patricia Oxley and her Acumen colleagues on its bumper 260-page fiftieth issue. Six months later we can hardly say that we hasten to make amends, only that this is the first opportunity to do so. The continued success of Acumen is a tribute to Patricia’s wise and humane view of the poetry scene,  which in turn played a part in the revival of SOUTH’s fortunes under its new management team. During a steep ascent of the learning curve, with the support of several editors of little magazines, we benefited particularly from her unstinting encouragement and advice. There has long been common ground between the two magazines as regards contributors and subscribers; and a visit to Torbay Poetry Festival, of which Patricia and her husband William are the energetic hosts, is a regular date for several SOUTH supporters, who also make their presence felt in its open poetry competition. It is a  pleasure to drink the health of Acumen with the traditional toast: “Poetry and friendship.”

Virginia Warbey

who was killed in a car crash in June 2004, had been a member of Chandlers Ford Writers for ten years. Born in Essex in 1968, she worked as a librarian, published her first poetry collection at 22, and won several competition awards. She had published two novels, and was at work on a third.

Chandlers Ford Writers have now published their own collection of 39 of her poems, Ratified (The Merdon Marque, 11 Swanton Gardens, Chandlers Ford SO53 1TP, 80pp, £6.95). They do not present the book as a funereal tribute to a life tragically cut short, but as a celebration of their friend’s literary and personal gifts, including “her ability to bring happiness to the gloomiest day.”

Vicki Feaver has praised the energy, humour, passion and variety of Virginia’s poems, which she says “remind you, in every line, of what it is to be alive in the world...with a poet’s heightened senses and imagination.” That is surely one of the best tributes any poet could wish for.

Keith Bennett

—already familiar to SOUTH readers as one of the most energetic champions of the cause of poetry in the south of England—has been
elected to the Council of the Poetry Society. He is among a number of new trustees who are actively supporting current efforts to reform the society’s constitution so as to make it less London-centred and more in touch with the majority of its members.

The Iain Rennie Hospice at Home

based in Beaconsfield, have sent us a copy of their 2005 Anthology of poetry and prose, the fourteenth annual one. It’s beautifully produced and being sold for £4.50 (plus postage). Further details from 01494 675536 or email [email protected]. The excellence of the cause goes without saying, but the contents are extremely enjoyable, if sometimes intensely moving. A number of justly familiar names have given good pieces.