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

In Praise of Aunts, MR Peacocke, 2008, Peterloo. £7.95  ISBN 978-1-9043244-9-2

Peacocke’s poetry spans a wide range. One end of the range is delightful entertainment – poems which are wise, observant and sometimes ‘period’: “Aunts with pockets, pocketfuls / of small, timely treats / and not wincing at stickiness / nor at blood” (In Praise of Aunts). At the other end of her range, she can write as densely and disturbingly as, say, Geoffrey Hill (though without his sometimes perverse obscurity).

These diverse modes also interconnect. In her apparently lighter work (including some skilful ‘found’ poems) there is scrupulosity in the choice of words, exceptional awareness of how syntax may work to assist clarity, care and economy in the shape of the poem, sensitivity about line-breaks. In the poem quoted above, ‘aunts with pocketfuls of treats’ would have been a cliché, but her approach is more analytical: she reminds us of a time when people had more pockets and when there was more thoughtfulness about children’s treats (“small, timely”).

Two poems on from In Praise of Aunts, we have her more obviously demanding Refuge:

What can be said of the stone eyelid
of a bridge? In that canthus a head may shelter,
propped, shadowy head in which the eyes are wounds.

This poem begins disarmingly, “It was the war, one of the wars”, but in the same stanza we are in a dangerous place “where a swollen river jostled”. We are, it seems, in deep, where ‘refuge’ means the opposite of refuge and what is ‘sheltered’ under the bridge is a vision of darkness and confusion. Being under the anonymous bridge is very like being in the dark minds of the deeply afflicted. The wounded head invoked in the poem is both an external appearance in a nightmarish dream (or perhaps linked with some actual experience) and the inner consciousness of the poet. 

Refuge begins and ends with the pain of war and its victims (“grit embedded at random in an eye”) and is one of five sequential poems (not a sequence) all different, all strong in different ways.

As well as range, there is also inventiveness and variety here. I particularly liked the two poems about the painter’s eye: Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds is spoken in the voice of Van Gogh, whose words remind us of oil paint, “these tangs of carmine poppybloodclots”; The Look records being appraised by David Hockney, “for a while afterwards my skeleton / observed itself through curious socket eyes”. The Look is set opposite a poem, The Value of X (incidentally one we published in the anthology Images of Women), about the poet seeing her reflected image and trying to understand the self, “as unfinished as ever”.  This is one of a poignant group of poems here about ageing and still being somehow incomplete. 

Peacocke is one of the very few contemporary poets writing in English who recalls to us the ‘punch’ of our language. This can perhaps be illustrated (inadequately) by short quotations:

Wild blood’s the apple of your perfect eye              Kestrel
Dust greys the back of every velvet chair                    Fair

a muffled watervoice
headlong with sibilants                                        The Place

something had gone out of it; or else perhaps
a flawless immobility had crept in                             Simile

but she’s smiling
clipping new fuses
to my eyeballs                                                   Wordnurse

Day shuts, and the last rose blackens,
the red plucked from it                                   Mother Moon

For her language, her skill and her depth, Peacocke has many admirers among fellow poets and discerning readers. But it is so much ‘par for the course’ that this remarkable poet is not better known and more celebrated.