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

‘Will My Boats Row Out To Sea Today?’ asks one poem title. “There’s only one way to know: by sea’s cold currency and by your shuddering survival”.

     The poet’s son lives in Iceland and her grandchildren were born there. The Planet Iceland is a country small enough to be civilised, old enough to be weird, and arctic and volcanic enough to be another planet. The book’s haunted by a pagan numinousness, as though something of the old soul of Iceland has got into the poet’s persona. Yet Iceland is feeling globalisation too: “the head of the east / and the head of the west / discuss... whether or not to prepare for / wars/ among the unoccupied stars”. Untechnological savagery still exists: an Eskimo heritage vulgarised into tourism retains its dog islands, where huskies are left for the summer without food, eat each other, and only the strongest survive to come back and work. But the subliminal feeling of the poems is her own, a survival of her childhood awareness and daring, and the authentic afflatus, without which poetry remains prose. When she was thirteen, she ran away with a Marmite sandwich, a pencil and a sixpence, posted a letter to her parents “Don’t worry, I’ve gone to live with Nature and spent the night in a dripping willow tree”. Asked by a policeman “Were you with boys?” she said “NO! with TREES!” And for her, poetry is a matter of survival.

When my girl died I thought I had come
To the end of words.
But later I knew
That words are all we have.
They are the tears that save us from drowning.

This 62-page volume is a sort of Selected. Though some poems are free-form and others intricately but subtly rhymed, the whole sequence is coherent statement.