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

The visual and textural qualities in Schneider’s language give you the sense of the luxury of gouache or oil. Some poems allude to, or are about, individual paintings but even when references aren’t overt, you sense the importance of colour as emotion in the writing. My feeling was that from moment to moment I was dipping into a beautifully-illustrated book remembered from childhood. That isn’t to denigrate the seriousness of her work however. The blurb on the back cover calls her work ambitious, which doesn’t quite ring true. I would say Schneider seems more serious than ambitious. She isn’t pushing forms and language to their limits, nor dealing with themes of a cosmic nature, nor indeed does she need to, being thoroughly intelligent in her exploration of the personal and moral. In poems as early on as ‘Caedmon’ and ‘Naming’ (from Cathedral of Birds and Opening the Ice), she considers the process and role of language in relation to identity and experience - “When I say your name/ with lips or fingers, or make its letters/ flow across a page,/ when you do the same with mine,/ we break off/ from the frogspawn mass,/ wriggle into separate selves” (from ‘Naming’) - and later, in ‘The Red Cupboard’ (from The Panic Bird) she returns to these themes but extends her enquiry to the question of the primacy of metaphor: “Why I am feeding this passion/ for seeing/ one thing as another...” “…Every apple/ I touch/ is the alphabet’s start, a wrinkled mouth,/ the curve of a cheek that persists/ from dream.” And yet interspersed between such themes and many moving accounts of personal and family history, (“Sad is the day the family house is dismantled: beds heartlessly handled, walls exposed...” “Sad is … the wind blowing across a treeless plain;/ the fabric of happiness turned inside out”) there is a sense of determination to overcome such experience and an engagingly warm sense of humour that softens and alleviates the darkness of Schneider’s voice.