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

OUT OF THE BLUE by Helen Dunmore,
256pp, £10.95, Bloodaxe Books
AN ENGLISH APOCALYPSE by George Szirtes,
144pp, £8.95, Bloodaxe Books
GETTING THERE by Matt Simpson,
78pp, £8.95, Liverpool University Press, 4 Cambridge St, Liverpool L69 7ZU

In Samuel Johnson’s History of Rasselas, the poet Imlac explains to Rasselas what it takes to be a poet. After listening to the wish list, which includes the ability to observe everything closely, be able to make classical allusions, knowing history and science, understanding human nature and never being concerned about present fame, Rasselas laughs and says he is convinced that ‘no human being can ever be a poet’. While Johnson can mock his own counsel of perfection, he also promotes it as an ideal. These three poets, all accomplished with previous acclaimed collections to their name, seem to be to be in the process of striving to attain these impossibles. All their titles reflect journeys: not merely physical journeys but the journey one makes as a writer.

Helen Dunmore is also known as a novelist and I feel she melds the qualities of her writing skilfully – her prose is poetically drenched with the senses and her poetry is unafraid of the ordinary and humdrum, which she delights in juxtaposing with the classical and the beautiful. In ‘Virgin with Two Cardigans’, there is a story for the reader to unfurl. The virgin of the title is an old woman walking on sticks, buttoning her cardigan. What Dunmore does with this is lyric poetry at its finest:

Virgin with Two Cardigans
pushing a pearl button
into the gnarl of its hole.

The use of the word ‘gnarl’ is evocative of the woman’s fingers, and the subtle sexual undertones of the last line bring out the pathos of the ancient virgin who probably has dedicated her life to a God who is ‘slow’ in unbuttoning ‘her two cardigans’, in other words, disappointing. The range of Dunmore’s imagery would have been approved by Johnson: her cat is ‘Viking’, she draws on fairy tale, Mediaeval Literature, Greek Mythology and Nature. She writes with an unflinching hand even about intimate issues such as contraception and birth without becoming over obsessed, a real danger of this subject matter, considering some of the bad poetry it creates in less self-critical hands. Lady Macbeth, Thetis, Mary Shelley: these are some of the personae she explores. Her poem about the Titanic is exquisite and manages to say new things. Dunmore knows how to draw the reader along with her, to point out things in a way that seems artless until you notice the rhyme scheme, the perfectly right word, the much more that is being said. The collection gathers poems written from 1975–2001, so this review can offer only a taster.

George Szirtes is never, for me, a comfortable poet. He is a formalist who has a surface charm and a painterly eye (‘sheep stud the hill like teeth’ for example, in ‘Sheep-shearing at Ayot St. Lawrence’), but beneath these beauties, his subjects are rarely comfortable. At the age of eight, he came to England as a refugee. The Budapest File (Bloodaxe 20000), tenderly evokes his childhood and adult feelings towards that city. In this new volume, he makes a critical journey through the England of his memory as well as England now, an England which in some ways is alien to him, though beloved. An English Apocalypse is a very dark collection. Much of the imagery is of nastiness: people ‘leer’, are ugly and gross, engaged in hen nights or watching wrestling, yet the elegance of the verse forms sets up a tension for the reader and give Szirtes the stance of an observer, without being judgemental. A sense of unhappiness pervades the collection as ‘the office seemed melancholy as do all / offices’ (‘VDU’) and the final sequence looks at different ways of the world ending, very much focused on England. It is as though we are being warned that our complacency cannot save us. There are some playful, more personal poems to redeem the world, for example in ‘Prayer for my Daughter’ a direct reference in the title to Yeats’ beautiful prayer for his daughter (and one also thinks of Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’); Szirtes’ rhyme scheme here helps to create the self-mocking tone (‘. . . quickie / . . . sticky / . . . picky’). He advises her, among other things to 'beware your father talking turkey’, which shows he is also aware of his own possible complacency. These poems are very much poems for a new century and millennium: whether it does turn out to match the uncomfortable visions Szirtes offers entirely depends on us. Will our journey lead us to redemption or obliteration? It remains to be seen. An English Apocalypse is rather like the Book of Revelations in the Bible, but with starker imagery. I believe Szirtes is planning a third volume, which may offer further redemptive healing. There is no doubt that An English Apocalypse is part of a larger, and significant work which must not be ignored.

Matt Simpson’s new collection Getting There offers plenty of redemption. The claiming of a family name is explored in the first section. Simpson evokes with vitality what Liverpool life was like:

But imagine a shire horse all dockroad jingle
Mane plaited, lugholes cockaded, hay bag swinging.
                                                        (from ‘A Great Grandfather’)

Poignantly, this is not a description so much as an imagining. Simpson has gone further back in family history than ever before, a journey into past roots, with precise and acutely observed details. Getting There is a culmination of many of the themes of Simpson’s work. Johnson would have approved of the knowledge communicated in poems like ‘Sarah Biffin’, ‘Ancestors’ and ‘Seventh Storey Heaven’, all of which wittily show the reader real historical characters evoked with tenderness and energy. Simpson is known for his elegies and this book contains some beautiful examples, ranging from one for his neighbour to a warm and honest poem for Adrian Henri. Simpson’s elegies are never sentimental and in ‘Winter Solstice’ his observation of humanity is painfully acute as he looks back on the 60s:

and then, yeah, yeah, the Beatles, giving Liverpool back
its cockiness and you there in the backhanded hope of it

with poems hawking their back-street sauciness,
their ingenuous love-me-do.

Simpson has always been a poet whose sense of humour and playfulness entertains the reader on the journey through his collections. There is always a sense of unfolding narrative as one poem neatly moves on to the next. This collection is representative of his finest work: his key themes of love, redemption and identity are explored and his journey encompasses both Liverpool roots, colonial links and the connections forged through literature, with Greece and Ireland, past and present.

These three poets all seem well on their way to fulfilling Johnson’s impossible criteria. The collections are all significant contributions to poetry, without the guff and fuss. All three are contemplative poets. The journeys are worth making.