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

The last two or three decades of the 20th Century saw a fairly radical change in the language of poetry, a change which had at least some of its origins in the proliferation of public readings and the increasing popularity among both audiences and writers of what has come to be known as ‘performance poetry’, not so much a matter of trying to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’ as to absorb it into its lexical texture in all its raw impurity.

     Many of the poems in Peter Sansom’s new collection, Point of Sale, demonstrate just how effective this strategy may be when employed with judgment and considerable formal skill. Take ‘Twelfth Night or What You Will’, for example, where the title itself is nicely ironic, and we find “the bingo with mum on Boxing Day,/ like inviting Eric Cantona, as Katherine says,/ for a kickabout...” can modulate a few lines later into “... a voice like a cassette, as you walk/ into a midnight wood...” with its faint echoes of Dante, and subsequently, of Robert Frost.

     Peter Sansom was appointed Poet in Residence at Marks & Spencer during 1999 and the title poem of the book is a sequence of flexible free-verse poems which together provide a kind of journal of the experience, a vivid and slightly breathless account of poetry workshops, readings, meetings, journeys, arrivals and departures, highly readable and, in the end, leaving a disturbing shadow of the unasked question Why?

     There are two very successful poems on painting, a slippery subject which often ensnares poets into wordy abstraction and irrelevance but does not do so here, and I was much impressed by ‘To John Keats From The Suffolk Coast’, an unsentimental but touching tribute to a great poet which does not attempt to reflect the colour or tonal richness of its subject’s language but settles for a tactful neutral tone.

     The first poem in the collection, ‘Driving by Night’ seems deliberately to withhold any hint of the mix of verbal textures that are to come. It begins “The res through trees/ is a lake or calm sea on whose far shore/ a holiday is waiting...” and, apart from that slightly pretentious “res”, the unflashy diction and exact images are sustained through what is a thoughtful and very pleasing poem.

     The second piece, ‘Sit-com’, opens like this: “The baby is at an age to say Oh fuck,/ The middle one sleeps off E with her boyfriend/ and has her prints taken shoplifting./ The eldest has his arse in the sofa...”

     Not much there of Hopkins’s “The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation” but it certainly holds your interest, as does the whole collection which I strongly recommend.