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

The cover photograph shows Gibbens leaning, dressed as a cowboy, against the locked iron gates of a cathedral. I take this as symbolic.

     The book’s first poem opens with the persona’s self-definition - “I am as the trees diagram./ I am as the rain illustrates on the window”. It suggests he feels like Keats, whose name was written on water. The poem then winds through cold winds, rain, pastures, empty streets and waking together to the point where I becomes you: “You are what the trees diagram...”

     A brawling family is in perfect agreement:

No one can say anything but
       someone must answer back.
       But don’t dare gainsay us
cause we stick together. Listen -
the furor’s chaos’s harmony.

     His 530-odd pages of poems that have appeared in everything from Agenda to the London Review of Books suggest a lover of mankind, at home with plants and children, with aspirations to know God, seeking and even finding some kinds of peace. “Traditional”, yes, and decent, but contemporary. Mawkishness threatens but is out: “This is where we live/ when no more knowledge/ can save us.”

From a Friday to a Friday man was made
                                Unmade,
                                Remade.
The cross rose where the fruit’s pip fell in the
                                                            shade.

     There are some strong poems here - ‘Of Ezra Pound’ is one. The sequence ‘Orpheus Ascending’, about a difficult love affair more than Orpheus, is ambitious and well-worked out. There’s a lyrical impulse in many of the poems and a lot of good observation of animals, birds and people. In the end I’d have preferred, I think, a shorter book, highlighting the poems of intenser passion.