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

I threw up the dirty water
            while his sheepdog licked my face
Then we shared a hand rolled cigarette
                      and a moment of true grace

                                              Brent Mitchell

I considered announcing this issue as having a spiritual theme, but then thought this might be misleading; here is a spirituality (as in Stanley Spencer paintings) of the agony of body and earth, here are soul poems, blues poems, poems of torment, darkness and light in which (& here in my view is the true sense of spiritual) in which the human spirit confronts the pain (the demons) within and without. One poet who struggled with the demons most of his life gave up the struggle exactly a year ago, and in May 2000 we lost one of this country’s most distinctive and powerful poetic voices. I am proud to include a tribute to Barry MacSweeney in this issue, including 3 unpublished poems of his, and I thank the poets concerned and in particular S.J.Litherland for enabling this to happen. No space for listings this time I regret, nor for contributors’ notes which will appear on a separate insert (including those missed from the last issue.)

    Acknowledgements - Johnny Duhan’s prose work is taken from his autobiography There Is A Time, to be published in Ireland in Sept 2001, (Brandon ISBN 0 86322 283 8 - or contact Steve MacDonough e-mail [email protected])

    Martin Gray’s epic tribute poem to Charlie Parker, Blues for Bird, will be published as a single 280 page vol. in Oct 2001 (Santa Monica Press, Los Angeles, California 90406, §17.95).