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

Kathryn Maris contrasts poets with different attitudes to restraint

Sasha Dugdale
The Estate
Carcanet (Oxford Poets) £8.95

Deborah Garrison
The Second Child
Bloodaxe Books £7.95

Sujata Bhatt
Pure Lizard
Carcanet £9.95

Sasha Dugdale is well known as a translator. So the arrival of her second collection, The Estate, is a pleasant reminder that she is also an accomplished poet. The first eleven or so poems are inspired by her visits to the Pushkin family estate. Many revolve around a popular legend. In 1825 Pushkin set out to visit friends in St Petersburg, but when a hare – a sign of bad luck – crossed his path, he turned back, thus avoiding the Decembrist revolution and the fate of friends who were sentenced to death, hard labour, or exile.

   Dugdale views this story obsessively, examining it from every angle. The opening poem is an almost imperceptible sonnet narrated from the point of view of the hare. He’s a knowing hare, with human thoughts, and he predicts, correctly, that he’ll change Pushkin’s fate by jumping out from under his bush. The second poem (which has an echo of Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ in sound and form) is narrated by Pushkin himself, who describes turning his horse around in the snow after spotting the hare and its little tracks. Whereas Frost and his horse move towards death (‘miles to go before I sleep’), Pushkin does the opposite, declaring, ‘I cannot cross this line.’ In the third poem, an omniscient narrator comments on fate and the human condition, saying ‘We must do what we must do’.

   The eight poems that follow depart from the hare and concentrate instead on the Pushkin estate itself: objects such as a footstool belonging to his lover, or a lake. Like an actor, Dugdale gets into the minds of her speakers. One can hear the translator in her, sensitive to the music of the past, creating a language that can feel a little foreign. Her poems are dignified, contemporary, but at the same time quirkily old-fashioned. The collection is full of sneaky sonnets, quiet end-rhymes and assonances, and tidy stanzas. Yet she has the ability to depart from these habits, as in an idiosyncratic villanelle that lacks repeating lines. Still other poems sprawl about the page with muffled wildness. Her music can be strange and ecstatic, with thrilling line breaks, as in:

No man is an island. No,
No man could seem this remote

The only difficulty in this book may, however, be this intractably formal voice. The primness suits the early poems about Pushkin and dramatic monologues such as ‘Lot’s Wife’: ‘I put everything into a grain sack / And fled. ‘Because we are righteous, he said.’ // But oh, I would have preferred to be beautiful.’ It seems out of place in later poems about contemporary life and her children. She keeps the reader at arm’s length in poems that have the potential to be intimate and immediate. Dugdale is at her best when she merges the narrative with the lyric, as in the poem ‘Motherlove’, which describes a conversation about death with her small son. Despite the reticence of the voice, the poem is deeply poignant, beginning with the son who points outside his window and asks if ‘they’ will die. We don’t quite know who ‘they’ are, but he seems to mean ‘everyone and everything’. The mother assures her son they won’t die. So she’s lied – and she knows she’s lied. But at the same time she believes she hasn’t lied; she has wishfully decided she will not let death happen.

   Dugdale’s work is thematically contained, and yet expansive. There is prehistory at one extreme and cosmological speculation at the other; there is Pushkin, and there is daily life. Poems are perhaps too often praised for their quietness. It’s natural to desire loud poems too and loud poems seem comparatively rare these days and in this country. But Dugdale’s quietness is different. She is like the shyest girl in school who is also the cleverest. One can only hope her intelligence will win out over the modesty of her poems, because she is a poet of great potential, who deserves notice as more than a translator.


To read Deborah Garrison’s second collection, The Second Child, alongside Dugdale’s is to get a fortuitous lesson in cultural and poetical differences between the United States and Britain. Garrison was on the staff of the New Yorker for fifteen years and is now poetry editor at one of America’s oldest and most prestigious presses, Knopf. She is also a mother of three who has moved with her family from New York City to New Jersey. For her, as for many New Yorkers with families who leave the city, such moves can be a source of distress, longing and even embarrassment. ‘Goodbye New York,’ subtitled ‘song from the wrong side of the Hudson’ is an example of a poem mourning her departure. It’s cheerful and touching, propelled by rhyming couplets and anaphora:

You were the lively graves by the highway in Queens
The bodega where I bought black beans. . .

You were ugly and gorgeous but never pretty.

Her poems can be very dark. ‘Not Pleasant But True’ is exactly that; the speaker contemplates jumping in front of a bus because she cannot contain the love and responsibility she feels for her thirteen-month-old child. She is so fearful of her child dying, that she considers escaping her terror by dying herself. (Conveniently, she is walking next to a graveyard.) The poem is emotionally brave, suggesting clinical depression and the skewed thinking that can lead to suicidal feelings. What saves the speaker is her one rational thought: ‘I was going to leave you without a mother!’ Such epiphanies, however, don’t necessarily save the poems, a fair few of which seem thin and shallow. Other, ostensibly lighter-weight poems, however, show a commendable ability to make true skill look easy.

   One of Garrison’s great strengths is her knack for imaginative and peculiar metaphors, as in ‘A Short Skirt On Broadway,’ which is in part a lament of what she perceives to be the loss of her youth (‘I used to have “legs,” ’ she says on observing a young woman walking down the street.) and in part a regretful account of weaning her child, who now has ‘legs of her own.’ That juxtaposition of breast milk and legs is inventive, as is the central metaphor in a later poem, ‘Playing Your Hand,’ which counterintuitively describes joy as ‘sound packed in a trumpet’s bell’ and tragedy as the sound released. A later poem “Birth Day Pun” is about mishearing her doctor when her son is born. Thinking he’s said, ‘you have a sun’, she realizes with self-satisfaction that she’s made a pun: a linguistic one, but also a flesh and blood one.

   Her wonderful titles (for example ‘The Past Is Still There’ and ‘Someday We Will Have to Drop the Objects to Which Our Hands Now Cling’) are flashy and witty, reflective of her bold opinions and obsessions. One of these obsessions is, of course, her children. This leads us back to Dugdale and cultural distinctions between the United States and Great Britain. Dugdale, a working mother, apparently grapples with the same fears and difficulties that Garrison does. The latter’s ‘Bedtime Story’ is essentially the same poem as Dugdale’s ‘Motherlove’. Yet Garrison demurs from talking too much about her children, perhaps a consequence of a stoical British attitude.

   Another contrast is that, except for occasional rhymes, there is little evidence of formalism in Garrison’s collection. Garrison writes only two technically formal poems: a sonnet and sestina, both of which have self-referential titles – ‘Unbidden Sonnet with Evergreen’ and ‘Sestina for a Working Mother’ – lest the reader miss the cleverness. Sonnets are so common in British poetry that it would hardly occur to a poet to put ‘sonnet’ in the title, and the same goes for sestinas. But the title aside, ‘Sestina for A Working Mother’ is among the best sestinas I’ve read in several years, comparable to some very good ones by Kate Bingham, Leontia Flynn, and Matthew Sweeney.

   Although Garrison’s poems will almost certainly strike a chord with poet-mothers, working mothers and New Yorkers, one trusts her wit and imagination will appeal to a larger audience too. Is there no harried commuter who hasn’t wanted to shove aside a slow and clueless traveller standing on the wrong side of an escalator? Well Garrison does – and, if that’s not a universal thought, what is?

No one could accuse Sujata Bhatt of alienating readers with too specific themes. She is all things to all people. Unlike the monkeys of her first poems who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil, Bhatt’s eyes, ears and voice are always in use. (I don’t exaggerate. This book is 134 pages long.) The three opening poems are intriguingly surreal. The monkeys eat chapattis stolen from a cat and discuss the difficulty of escaping a crocodile with one’s liver intact. But they have an irritating tendency to make little proclamations, as in ‘A Hidden Truth’:

[the monkeys] always knew
they were women –
Women, not monkeys.

   These first poems are short lyrics and therefore have a built-in potential to be under-developed. Even though some of the long poems can also be falsely profound, a lot are very good. A series of fifteen haiku is breathtaking. The louder, less subtle poems also have wonderful moments, but can get out of control as in the dramatic monologue ‘Black Sails’ with these lines:

Today I think these boats
     come out of hell –
dripping with black blood
     from the moors –

   What is great about Bhatt is her startling knowledge of international poetry and art: contemporary, ancient and in between. She seems to have been influenced by everyone and everything. One can see Cavafy, Li Po, Rumi, Akhmatova, Jorie Graham, Fiona Sampson, and Selima Hill in her poems – and that just begins to scratch the surface. Her subjects, too, are infinite. Name a topic, and you’ll find it. Encephalitis? It’s there. So are Buddhism, Rilke, Jane Eyre, witches, Copenhagen, even Deborah Garrison’s home state, New Jersey. Poems from this collection have been published in India, Russia, the United States, England, South Africa, Portugal, Canada and Greece. The poems understand other cultures; and other cultures apparently understand them.

   Her poems are rarely tidy on the page, tending to be incrementally indented – not dramatically so like Jorie Graham, but more like Marianne Moore or William Carlos Williams in Paterson. She creates breath, silence, speech and song. Her ear is very good, sometimes impeccable. But be forewarned; if you are suspicious of poems about visual art there are nine poems in response to etchings by Paula Rego, nine poems in response to lithographs by Paula Rego and nine poems in response to paintings by Paula Rego.