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

This is Myra Schneider’s seventh collection and I am struck by its variety. There is a 30 page story in verse, two lengthy accounts of experiences abroad, four poems based on paintings (on which, not having the originals, I don’t feel qualified to comment) and a great variety of other poems - reminiscence, meditation and symbolic drama.

Given this range, the reader is likely to respond to some more strongly than others. The verse story, The Waving Woman, is written in flexible four-stress lines, is compelling plotted and moves effortlessly between straight narrative and heightened description. As always when reading verse narrative, I found myself wondering how it would read if written as prose. My abiding feeling is that verse narrative, like verse drama, is now a dead form into which no amount of effort will breathe life again.

I found some of the personal reminiscences (Two Weeks in Trinidad, Stepping) too close to the described experience, too heavily laden with fact, for the poet’s feeling to come through. On the other hand, Considering the Lilies, which is based on a walk in the uplands of Madeira, is a finely sustained three-part sequence in which the described experience and its emotional impact are satisfyingly integrated. This is the most completely realised and most moving of the longer poems.

Elsewhere, the sequence on Keynsham church strikes me as sentimental, but it is nicely corrected by the next poem, Generosity, in which the emotional coldness of a Christian retreat house is contrasted with the pleasure of eating bread-and-honey in one’s own kitchen. For me, this ability to register the tension between the desire for illumination and a sardonic awareness of mundane reality is Myra Schneider’s greatest strength. It appears in Kingfisher where the bird’s unimportance is noted:

Besides, the bird is no paragon.
The plumage warns of a taste that is foul;
the fish it bangs to death
on a branch it swallows with a silver slither.

but which ends:

So why do I comb your stream,
my reasonable clothing discarded,
why do I write at your table dreaming
of that burning blue moment?

Incidentally, the first verse quoted above illustrates a certain hit-and-miss quality about Schneider’s imagery: “silver slither” is a fine rendering of the bird swallowing a fish, but ‘The plumage warns of a taste / that is foul” is nearly meaningless. The bird’s plumage doesn’t relate to its fish-eating and fish don’t taste foul to a kingfisher. No doubt Schneider means that she finds the bird’s fish-eating foul, which is sentimental.

For me, the most original short poems are Waving a Wand which is an oblique take on the Cinderella story and An Old Story which renders the massacre of the innocents in terms of children’s dolls and has a superbly ambivalent ending. I would like to see more of this side of Schneider’s work.