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

Kathryn Gray reviews Sally Read’s The Point of Splitting (Bloodaxe £7.95), Myra Schneider’s Multiplying the Moon (Enitharmon £8.95) and Helen Oswald’s The Dark Skies Society (Waterloo Samplers £3)


Sally Read’s debut The Point of Splitting marks the arrival of a poet of great promise and some distinction. Many debuts these days seem very alike - if only for their insistence on the softly, softly approach, the eschewing of risk-taking in style and subject for the easy-reach for the tried and tested. But Gregory Award winner Read defines herself by her risks. Here is a poet unafraid of walking the wilder side of life and of challenging the reader with her unflinching narratives on the nature of desire and love. Indeed, many poems collected here are explicit investigations of sex and while these may not constitute to my mind her most achieved work, they are indicative of an edgy schtick few poets – male or female – would these days dare approach.

In Read’s most successful work, violence and elegance walk hand in hand - her style is not unlike that of Plath’s middle period. There is real pleasure in the disparity between her light lyric touch and the menacing and / or visceral description she frequently employs; she disarmed this reader and defied the expectation. In Winter Light, for example, a poem that details the after-effects of chemotherapy, the ravaged subject is brought into comparison with and relief by her environment. The paring down of her body mirrors the downsizing of her material existence and its distractions:

She has stripped her house
of other knickknacks, books, CDs,

packed and stored them in a basement,
as if she needed to unhook

each small trinket
from ankles and wrists

so nothing weighs her…

Later, while setting a vase on a windowsill, she feels “thrilled / by the opalescence / of glass against glass / as shafts of pale sun / pool in its curves / like thin blood in the heart’s chamber”, revealing an unexpected allusion, I supposed, to MacNeice‘s Snow. In this, and poems such as The Cello, The Distance Between Two Points, I Waited the Afternoon in Your Room and the powerful elegy to her father, Backlash (“Five years on / and it hits as it always does – / like a boat that’s smooth / and quiet till the deep swell / that carries it so seamlessly / slaps back”), Read reveals herself to be a surprising poet – and one of true sophistication and control.

I mentioned sex. And there is plenty of it here. Though it may be difficult to fault Read’s technique – her manifold virtues include a very fine ear and a preternatural feel for the line – I wondered whether sometimes she goes that little bit too far as regards her subject matter. The first line of Breaking Fish Necks makes its bold statement – “The next afternoon we tried anal sex” – and goes on to bring the narrator’s rectum into comparison with a peach. My eyes duly watered. In Prognosis, intercourse during the menses was a case of too much information for this reader (“My stockings are spilt / round my knees, on my thighs blood is staunched / in brown geographical lines… / I’ve learnt there’s no slowing you / as you pocket cigarettes, / expertly bin the red-streaked condom”). While there is little doubt that Read is trying to make intelligent points here – namely about the ambivalence of love and the power relations of sex – I wondered whether these same points might have been made without the over-18 certificate. Further, I wondered whether sometimes she had felt the temptation to pack in the explicit to legitimise her points, almost as if by staking her claim to such ‘brave’ graphic autobiography of the intimate she felt she would be taken more seriously – or whether she was simply trying to obtain an effect by shock value. I think that for most readers the effect may be the opposite of what she was aiming for. Likewise, very occasionally, the comparison of violence and power struggles in the political sense with those that characterise or govern the sexual are too heavy-handed and obvious by far; thus we get the phallic image of the gun in poems such as Soldier, Dismantling the Gun and The Soldier’s Girl.

Qualification and criticism aside, Read’s work impressed me and on the whole I found it fresh and confident. But I can’t help but wonder whether Read’s true fulfilment as a poet lies in the fine poems I mentioned earlier, where more subtle tensions are teased out of her talent. Certainly though, Sally Read is undoubtedly one to watch.

Read’s collection spoiled me with its headstrong daring. This perhaps accounts for why Myra Schneider’s Multiplying the Moon felt like something of a let-down. Schneider’s subject matter is commendably broad and inclusive - death, epiphany, love, memory and spirituality are all richly detailed here – but her language seemed to me somewhat unchallenging. There is undoubtedly a beauty to her work, but frequently this beauty can veer off into a kind of affected, cluttered prettiness. At the heart of the poem Leaving, for example, lies the kernel of an interesting idea: the poet leaves a much-loved home, the bricks and mortar of the home being the stuff of personal history. It ought to be moving but loses much of its force by being overwritten – and often overreaching for something very nice to say:

                    I think
    Of crucial clothing I forgot to pack:
    My mock-velvet scarf steeped
    In panther dusk, the cotton square
    Daubed with lime and shocking pink
    Which flicks away depression.

There’s no denying Schneider’s gift for cadence here – but “panther dusk”? Elsewhere in this poem a car is described as “a doe spotted with sun”. In fact, what Schneider means to say is that the car is merely dappled with sun since a car can never look, seem or be like a doe – or at least any I have observed. But Schneider is unwilling to settle for it and so here, as elsewhere in this book, she is anxious to shoehorn in the image – even when that image is actually a very poor fit. So much in reading depends on the necessary recognition and where Schneider employs these kinds of images to acquire gravity or symbolism she loses the reader. After much unnecessary description, the pay off in this poem seemed so slight so as to be nonexistent. When Schneider rhetorically (or perhaps, then again, not) enquires “is this keeping or letting go?”, I really felt unable to provide an educated guess either way.

The long poem Orpheus in the Underground, a reworking of the myth through a clever image of a busker on the underground, seemed more successful to me. There’s a greater directness and momentum to this poem from the beginning (“Impossible not to collide with heat. It rises / from the labyrinth of passages, platforms / and grime-lined tunnels, descends / from the street with the yellowed grainy air / sticks to underarms, crotches, hair”). If Schneider falls down a little when she tries to render an authentic yoof-speak (“You stupid wee bitch, leaving me for that git”; “His music’s cool and ooh, those eyes!”), she still holds the interest and engages the imagination. It is in poems such as this and The Car and Choosing Yellow that Schneider excites and awakens the reader with a clear focus on her vision, without the distraction of all those adjectives which tend to muddy her philosophical concerns.

Helen Oswald, like Sally Read, is a poet presenting this year with an anticipated collection. In this case, Oswald debuts with a pamphlet, but The Dark Skies Society bodes well for a full-length collection. She has a great line in the ambivalent and bittersweet. The strength of her poems lies in her identifiable subjects – family, sexual love and grief – handled in ways which confound platitude or sentiment but which still manage to be highly moving and often extremely witty. In the Beginning is a wonderful poem which functions not only as a lesson in how language paradoxically takes us away from our true ‘oneness’ with the world, but also gives us an insight into a portrait of the artist as a young baby, and merits quoting in its entirety:

    My mother used to leave me
    out under a lemon tree, wriggling
    bug-like on my back, dandled
    in the black carapace of my pram.
    I must have stared up and seen
    those bright shapes suspended,
    looked and looked and thought nothing,
    acquainting myself with the facts, the pure essence
    of lemonhood, before the word molded
    itself from formless sounds.
    Now I have the label ‘lemon’
    pinned all over that tree. It is the first thing I see –
    the one thing
    between those lemons and me.

Oswald’s imagery is often very clever and apt. Holiday novels shrivel into “pancakes” in the heat; ribs are like a “shipwreck”. Sometimes, however, there is not enough imagery employed, and so certain poems, such as Second Language or Learning Gravity can feel a bit talky and seem flat. There is also the feeling – very occasionally – that Oswald is too safe, often bypassing the risks so inherent and crucial to her vocation. While there is no questioning that ambivalence can be an effective position for a poet to take now and then, if overused it can seem to be mere affectation and hint at a lack of creative or philosophical daring, with an emotionally ambiguous poem like Chilled, for example, seeming rather surplus to requirements in this collection. That said, I am certainly looking forward to seeing her first full-length collection in due course. In the meantime, this simple, but elegantly produced pamphlet is certainly one to recommend.