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

This is an original volume in the sense Mozart meant when he said his poetry was no more original than his nose. In other words, it’s not like everyone else, it’s not gimmcky, it’s the work of someone being himself, having a self worth being, and leaving his own fingerprints.

     His favourite contraption is a story, written in varying five-, six- or seven-foot sprung verse lines, often about historical people like Dino Lipatti or Salvatore Giuliano, the Sicilian bandit. They’re both enchanting tales and parables.

     ‘A Pavane for Sydney Housego’ is a humorous salute to a violinist busking for pennies in the park.

When Sydney fiddles, Bach fumes in his
                                     grave. Mojo whines.
Mojo, ears bigger than his master’s, listens to
                                 the music of the spheres,
Which is why when Sydney scrapes at the
              violin he drops snout between paws,
And, from as close to the ground as possible,
          stares into his beloved tormentor’s face.
A man plays badly yet to his own ears well
                        enough to force the applause
Of the scowling angels he keeps on low salaries.

     It’s as though a Chagal had painted itself as a poem. A small girl “watches from the sanctum her childhood is, where the light has no visible source” and drops a coin in the silver collection plate of his sardine tin. The bored angels jabber among themselves, are ready to up and go, but can’t abandon Sydney, “who figures this world is his bench, the smaller without whom the greater can never be”.

Always music comes from inside, which is
                                         how the gods give,
Which is how one who plays only because he
                                              has to receives.

     There’s a lot of that rare thing, considered independent thought, behind this elegant poetry. When the poem enacts George Sand and the dying Chopin completing the Preludes in Majorca’s worst winter for decades, it seems to be articulating what one heard in the music but could never quite articulate, and it does it through narrative not impressionism. By such means Kociejowski manages to ask the big questions as though they were not philosophical or theological, but poetic, and is usually prescient enough not to give the answers. The book comes from Anvil, not a hit-and-miss publisher.