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

Enitharmon, £7.95

What makes a good collection? Whatever the magic is, this is one. The wartime b&w cover photograph, Gate to Exchange Station, is aptly chosen for a book about some of Michael Henry's family living within the life–span (1910 to 1995) of one of them, to whom it's dedicated. Two world wars, army, navy, medicine, battles, injury, capture, POW camps, demob, loneliness: these simple words convey something of the range of experience explored. But, for poetry, it's the language over content factor that's crucial – not just what things are seen, or how they are.

Sometimes, rather than only fucking you up, families give you things beyond value, as they seem to have done here: Henry's treatment is not hero worship of men blessed and then punished by the Gods, but an acute psychological study; not least of himself caught in the act of searching and finding them now, in his own maturity. Yet it's as though he's had to use some strange instrument which only reveals the people in fading light, or through a pin– hole camera, or by the use of mirrors and prisms. Virtually nothing is seen directly, or explained simply. So much is left for the reader to work at to get the rich rewards which are yielded by repeated readings. Patience marks the method employed by the poet as he teases his poems out of the dust of the all but lost worlds of his father's and grandfather's generations. Note also that we are working in a dimension of intense emotion, controlled with an iron grip, the poet usually seeing through the eyes of others. Hence multiple voices, which require all your concentration.

There's little humour here, but there are beauty and many epiphanies: "when swallows minimed telephone wires" (Summer of Thirty–Nine); "We see you faltering/mothlike towards the light" (Lul– worth Skipper); "I feel her cuffs strigil down the sharp of my back", (this last in a poem, Dover's Powder, about an English nurse in a German hospital attending to POWs).

Some very moving poems are austerely restrained ones about an uncle struggling to cope with living alone at the dog–end of his life, adhering to deeply instilled rules of conduct, dependent on shrinking financial resources and diminishing human contact.

This collection, with its distilled feelings of love, grief, guilt, joy, sense of belonging and helplessness, shot through with brilliant images, shows why poetry is vastly more important than prose. The twentieth century was formidable. I feel enriched by this way of seeing it.