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

EMPTIED SPACES by David Jaffin, Abelard-Schuman Ltd., 158 Buckingham
          Palace Road, London SW1. £1.25.

SELECTED POEMS of Marguerite Edmonds, Workshop Press, 2 Culham
          Court, Granville Road, London N4 4JB. 50p.

The philosopher Wittgenstein once said of an obscure. Austrian poem, “I don’t know what it means, but its tone delights me’. I sometimes feel like this myself when confronted by much of the better poetry being written nowadays, when poets have to invent their own rules; and it is true that we lack a proper critical apparatus. It was so much easier in the Eighteenth Century: one knew where one was.

     These two volumes both puzzle and please me and the tone of many of the poems in both I do find delightful. David Jaffin’s is a big book with few poems in it and Marguerite Edmonds’ is a small book with many poems in it. Jaffin is a private poet concerned with investigating brief moments and brief sensations inside these moments. I believe that he struggles hard to find the right words to record these sensations. For though his poems appear to be lyrics they are not smooth or regular but angular, often even jagged as if pressure were forcing the words out of true. Sometimes the poems just end up being flat and pedestrian; it is not a poetry of startling, revelatory images, but it seems to be a poetry that is both deeply felt and meant.

     His shorter poems succeed best, there is no time for the language to get out of joint and an effort of compression appears to refine it, as in ‘Glass Bowl’ where

“Splinters of/ glass, words re-/flect the/ ordered sound/ placed on the
ped-/ estal/ turned round,/ that form appreciably/ diminished-/ tone is less
than/ sound”.

     The last two lines are a little throw-away and this fault recurrs fairly often. But, if you can forgive the apparently arbitrary cutting up of the line into haphazard lengths, an impression of powerful feeling and taut observation emerges, like a strong jet of water being squeezed through a very small hole. There are quite a few similar examples in this elegantly produced volume with its original lithograph by Jacques Lipchitz.

     I was very pleased to discover that Workshop Press have produced the volume by Marguerite Edmonds, almost as a gesture of memorial (she died on November 10, 1971). Though widely published in magazines, her poetry has received volume treatment too seldom. But it is difficult to know what to say of her poetry because she always seems to reach the same standard. Whether she is writing about love or painting, birds, beasts or plants, her poems never miss their mark. She wrote reasonably well about everything. This would appear to indicate a wide, though perhaps not deep, sensibility and range of interest.

     A phrase like,

. . . . . . . . . . eternity’s eye watches
words
falling like tears
into a poem . . . . . . . . . .  

is recognisably hers, could conceivably be taken from any of her poems. It is also a little easy and unspecific. And it is in this that my occasional unease about her poetry lies: there is a fogging, a dimness eventually over the poems in this book taken as a whole; they merge in the mind and tend to make one vague impression, instead of many impressions. There is a dispersal of emotional intensity that ends in a panorama a little too unconcrete.

     I think I am right in saying that she wrote most of her poetry in the last years of her life. Perhaps she wrote too much, found a technical formula too quickly. But this is not to say that there are no good poems here. There are, and Norman Hidden is to be congratulated on producing such an efficient little booklet from all the wide range of her material at his disposal. I hope this production will be widely read and stimulate many who do not know her poetry to seek out more.