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

This is a book about being in love in our increasingly weird world, transformed by the scientific view and the bombardments of the media. It’s exploring a new feeling of being human, and registering the survival of love in spite of everything.

     ‘Stanzas for the Harp’ sees an erotic evolutionary world in which the human lovers are deeply implicated. Sun and water couple. Even the moon, its light the copulation of the sun, “exults in our presence, reels at the touch of our eyes on its skin, not living as we are, but nonetheless with a kind of life”. And the meaning of the whole?

..... its meaning
ours, ourselves it source, from ocean
to estuary, cloudscape, land,
nothing set apart from us,
from shamelessness, till we cease
to look, or lack joy in love.

Some of this is almost a contemporary restatement of Shelley, and though Shelley is not mentioned, many of the poems are “making it new” in Pound’s correct sense of rewriting something old - ‘After Nesta Wyn Jones’, ‘After Richard Crashaw, Bulla (c,1646)’, etc. Against the loving empathy, television information can offer ‘A Recipe for Insanity’. Language means nothing in itself: it can lie. When it tells the truth - “ Blackbirds are dinosaurs.… They strut the earth as if they own it still,/ croak feebly, mock you. Live on worms” - it can disconcert with its defamaliarisations. ‘Biology Lessons’ takes us on a children’s visit to a museum:

Here is the pathos of a stuffed monkey,
A jar of eyes from a child’s bad dream,
A white rat flayed on a board with chrome
                                                             pins,
A thick, fruiting pungency on the air.
A child unlocks a skull, keeping count
Of each bone removed, while others admire
The cells of an inner cheek, or endure
The dissection of a freshly caught hare.

With dissection, the language becomes more concrete. Scarification can lead to scarification. A poem on the dung beetle - “violet legs scuttling on errands in a patient Communion with shit” - leads into poems exploring death and decay. Pharoah is eaten by white mice and turns into droppings.

     This first volume suggests a mind in progress, and it will be interesting to see where it goes.