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

A lot of poems in this collection occupy a cultural and aesthetic middle-ground that will make them readily accessible, entertaining and resonant for a wide public: poems like ‘Coda’ - a forcing-house school poem; like ‘No Surrender’ - a phoney cultural event poem; and an ‘Adult Education’ ... poem. All familiar ground and sentiment. Nothing wrong with that but it does have secondary effects on the poetic work itself and one of these is the desire of the poet to ensure the reader by some heavy-handed overwriting.

     “In divine contemplation, piety and sincerity, blue/ is symbolic of these things” begins the poem ‘A Study In Blue’. Excursions into allegory and/or into mythology run into this problem and indeed into a sense of consequent unease:

I am resurrections, tricked
out in my child’s clothes
and fashioned for arty shops

for people who do not know
my history and miracle.

     (From ‘Harvest at Dyffrynsaith’)

     There are also a few poems alluding to the holocaust that take little swipes at things German, for example ‘The German Lesson’. That’s an unworthy game for a poet.

     So I looked very hard at the poems I found outstanding and that gave me a measure of this poet’s gifts and in them found a sense of direction, movement and dynamic that derives from the conviction in adherence to the single theme and thus stayed clear of overwriting: ‘Emmanuel Man’ begins: “Hearing a man cry is not like/ the scratching whine of a baby...” - continues “Hearing you cry, with your lost/ voice, your disease creeping/ into every organ...” - continues “Hearing you cry, I say we’ll go/ somewhere to look at trees and sky...” And similarly the simplicity of staying with a single movement produces another fine poem ‘Season In Hell’. These are just two examples in a generally enjoyable collection.