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

the slipped leash by Paul Henry.
Seren Books, 30-40 Nolton Street, Bridgend, CF31 3BN. 64pp; £6.95.

Facing Demons by Ann Alexander.
Peterloo Poets, The Old Chapel, Sand Lane, Calstock, Cornwall, PL18 9QX. 80pp; £7.95.

The Man Who Sold Mirrors by Jane Kirwan.
Rockingham Press, 11 Musley Lane, Ware, Herts., SG12 7EN.136pp; £7.95.

Pet Shops & Other Poems by Ewa Lipska,
translated by Barbara Bogoczek & Tony Howard.
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, OL14 6DA. 88pp; £8.95.

Wales’s Seren Books is rapidly becoming the UK’s most interesting mainstream poetry imprint. To recent fine collections by Tony Curtis, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, and especially Pascale Petit, we now have added Paul Henry’s the slipped leash. Henry’s collection is full of paths not taken, lives which might have been, had habitual constraints been escaped. Obsessive internal narratives constantly pose the big ‘what if ?’ question:

Perhaps if they made love, once
in a cheap hotel
where the shower’s broken
and the dead fly on the window sill
won’t tell
                                                (‘As Close as it Gets’)

Spare, cunningly constructed cadences (look at the comma in line 1 and reflect on how different the effect would be without it) create a subtle music which, combined with minute and unflinching attention to scruffy ordinary life, place it very near the similarly-focused genius of Tim Cumming. Elsewhere, Henry’s articulation of the banal figures of his youth’s suburban pop culture assume universal significance through deft juxtaposition and reiteration of their own iconic status:

     A whistle blows.
On a platform, holding their pose
Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson
won’t let go, won’t let go.
                                                (‘A Model Railway’)

Simon Armitage, anyone? (In case anyone’s inclined to take my comparisons amiss, let me say now that Cumming and Armitage are two of the few contemporary English poets I unequivocally admire.) Henry’s detailed personal tableaux seek to be emblematic of specific times and the lives that arose from them. They are also an unblinking examination of a personal emotional history. They would be the less for not being both, something that our current slew of neurotic confessional poets could do with bearing in mind, as well as the self-appointed political avant-garde. It’s not just the ability to synthesise ideas and feelings that makes this a terrific book, however. Henry has a great eye for an image:

             The bay
opens up at the end.

Already stitching the torn land
back to the dazzling sea.

His ear is also finely tuned, each poem gifted with as near perfect a
structure as its individual subject matter has any right to ask for.

   The word demons seems to be quite popular in poetry titles of late, as in, presumably, ‘confronting...’ or, for Ann Alexander, Facing the same. It’s a little dispiriting to come across a concept used to such devastating effect in Barry MacSweeney’s last book applied to fairly mundane preoccupations, which are hardly such stuff as eschatology is made on. Alexander’s collection comprises efficient enough verse, but with precious little to engage or upset. She’s quite good on the odd verbal conceit: ‘a sulk of cottages, barns, estate’ (‘Madron’) but inclined to throw away any stylistic advantage this may win her by overstatement:

the kind of mildewed, surly place
with too many mentions in the local rag,
on the crime page.
                                                ('Madron')

The second line’s fair enough, but already the writer’s going for a respectable complicity. The third is a rather weak joke, and the fourth treats the reader as a complete imbecile. Much of what Alexander sees fit to versify really isn’t worth the candle. ‘Respectability costs’ is a rather sad retread of Jenny Joseph’s Greatest Hit:

When you’re respectable, you can’t
neck a skinful, reel through town,
then spew it all up in Barclays doorway

Occasional attempts at postmodern irony fall embarrassingly flat:

This poem is anaemic.
It lies flat on the page, dull, pale
                                                (‘Blood transfusion’)

Well, yes, actually. Yet this is a pity. It’s clear Ann Alexander can write. The above-quoted ‘Madron’ has its moments, and ‘The Journalist’ very skilfully conflates modern concerns with the eternal shortsightedness of individual humans.

I vaguely recall reviewing Jane Kirwan’s first collection, Stealing the Eiffel Tower, but all I remember about it is that nothing in it was particularly memorable. I’m very pleased, then, to note that Kirwan appears to have found a worthy subject for her undoubted technical skills. The Man Who Sold Mirrors takes as its theme exile, oppression, asylum, and the culture shock experienced both by those who undergo these traumatic movements and those who try to relate to them. Kirwan develops a sense of strangeness, of disjuncture, out of an action as simple as opening a packet of coffee:

Slipped from red berries
bean-like seeds are dried and pulverised

so that laid flat, shape lost
there’s no resemblance to what was there before

Simply a name.
I snip foil off the Lavazza
                                                (‘Caffeine’)

At the other end of the spectrum, she looks for comprehensible metaphors for cultural enormities, and, as she must, only compounds the confusion and terror through imagination:

      snuffs at the smuggled chicks
in wooden crates that fight for space,
a thousand grades of yellow.

Feathers plucked could make a bed, wipe an arse.
...

They could be pecked to death,
never reach the words.Chatter of complaint. Joy.
Bury the chick. Joy.
                             (‘They Are Burning Books in the Library’)

This is a powerfully imaginative, engaged book, which ought to be required reading for Home Secretaries who think that exile is a soft option, and Prime Ministers who believe evil can be stamped out with bombs.

The Polish poet Ewa Lipska has first-hand experience of repressive regimes, and knows the tendency of human beings to collude in – even manufacture – their own oppression. Having survived the death of her country’s Communism, she remains alive to new methods of mindcontrol:

We die more and more gorgeously
in the Gianni Versace collection
                                                (‘Height of Fashion’)

Lipska maintains a healthy scepticism towards all received ideas, tempered with the uncertainty that such an attitude necessarily brings in its train:

At last at Christmas you can
disconnect the phone.
The neighbours can bang on the door
if God’s born.

I watch Casablanca
with my usual
appetite for digression.

I toy with solitude
                                                (‘At Christmas’)

The one problem I have with this collection is the perennial one around translated poetry: that it just isn’t possible. Poetry is (or should be) so rooted in the texture of language that translation is at best a vague and approximate exercise, at worst a complete waste of time. Respect, therefore, to Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard, who have struggled with this fact and come up with a book which is never less than challenging and absorbing.