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

I suppose the first thing to say is that my choices here aren’t in any sense implying a sort of ‘pick of the crop’. For a start, a number of the books that appear on the Alt-Gen list have already been reviewed in previous issues of Staple - so it seemed sensible that I should at least choose collections that would be new to the review pages*. I’ve also tried to select titles that raised what I thought were interesting issues about poetry - rather than ones that I simply enjoyed, or were written by pals, or by people with whom I had scores to settle etc. Anyway, I’m sure you know what I mean. So, with those codicils & disclaimers neatly initialled by all parties, let’s begin...

By rights I ought not to be that well disposed towards Geoff Hattersley. On the three or four occasions I sent poems to The Wide Skirt (of which he was the editor) he sent them straight back, almost by return. But I guess it’s time to rise above all the jealousy & grudge-bearing that is the dark-side of contemporary poetry, and say that I think Harmonica is an outstanding book. Probably his best yet. It’s dark, funny, punchy, uncompromising, raw, elegant, accessible, layered, provocative, breezy, bleak, ironic, real, surreal
... It’s the genuine article.

It comes to you in mustard yellow covers sporting (what I imagine is) a captured film still of a grizzled Henry Fonda in cowboy gear, grinning & holding up a harmonica. It’s split into 3 sections. The first has poems that happen, for the most part, in domestic settings, poems about being a husband, a wife, a parent, a child. The subject matter is infused with a recognisable Hattersley-esque melancholy, & there are brief, telling & tender (but always unsentimental) references to the poet’s mother who, we learn, died in 1998. This is from ‘I was an Unarmed Teenager’:

My mother’s getting warm
in front of an open oven,
a pot of tea just made,
Sunday People on the table
open at the crossword page,
and the dog slobbers towards me
with prisoner’s eyes
but he’s no chance of a walk on the canal bank
right now. ‘How do you die
like a cowboy,’ my mother asks,
‘four-three-four?’

the poignant line break at ‘... ‘How do you die’ is of course where the poem reveals itself to us.

The book’s second section centres on working life, in particular on Geoff Hattersley’s working life - as a machine operator in a plastic injection moulding factory. This is, by his accounts, a variously dull, repetitive & oftentimes physically exhausting job. The grinding, destructive sense of work is counterpointed by the struggle to stay sane, alert & alive to the more sustaining aspects of existence. As he points out in ‘The Depth’ ... ‘It’s the sort of job where you lose / something, something / you spend the weekends / looking for with tired eyes.’

By the third instalment the subject matter is zigzagging back & forth
between work, home, pubs, childhood, films ... Some sample titles give an idea of the sort of poetic landscape we’re in: ‘I Did Brain Surgery on a Barnsley Pub Floor’ (perhaps the quintessential Geoff Hattersley title), ‘I Dreamed I Burst Balloons’, ‘Nothing Nothing Nothing’.

All of these poems are terribly (& I think that is just the adjective, by the way) easy to read. I found myself fairly effortlessly swallowing one poem after another. That doesn’t mean of course that they’re easy to write; as we know, that’s very far from the case. There’s a sort of skilful under-writing going on here, a poetry that’s sparing in its use of the standard, contemporary tricks & tropes. In some ways you might almost characteriseit as a kind of anti-poetry. But however he does it, Geoff Hattersley manages to portray boredom without being boring, hatred without being hateful, disenchantment without disenchanting the reader.

There are lots of other good things in here too ...references to Westerns, blues & harmonicas that satisfyingly bind the collection together; finely judged injections of wit & bathos; & a cumulative force to the poems which makes the whole greater than the sum. There are times when the bleakness of the vision gets a little hard to take, but you just have to stay with it. Somebody (I can’t remember who) said - referring, I think to a Radio 1 breakfast show presenter - that there’s a certain sort of cheerfulness which in its accumulation actually makes you miserable. Well, this seems to be true in reverse for the poems in Harmonica. Geoff Hattersley is the sort of writer to tell it like it is &, as life teaches, it’s often quite unpleasant . In their cumulative strength, these poems build up to a picture of hard work, anxiety, disappointment, anxiety about disappointment, that’s true, but with periodic dazzling, redemptive flashes of humanity & humour. So that whilst the vision may well be a disenchanted one, its expression, its poetry, somehow elevates us.

Which brings me to Letting Loose the Hounds, a first collection from Martin Hayes, & another book with work as its central theme. As it is summarised on the back cover of this handsomely produced Redbeck volume, Martin Hayes’ background is a fairly offhand, Loneliness-of-the-Long-Distance-Runner-ish, heroic failure sort of affair. Born in London in ‘66, he was expelled from school three months before he was due to sit his O Levels. As a youth he played football for Arsenal & Orient at South East Countiies level and cricket for Middlesex Colts - where he was voted ‘the cricketer most likely to succeed’ after an under-16s tournament playing
alongside Nasser Hussain & Phil Tufnell. Since then he’s spent 16 years in the courier industry, working his way through the ranks to office manager.

And the courier industry is what Letting Loose the Hounds (a runner-up in the 1999 Redbeck poetry competition) takes as its subject: 48 pages of poems about work, a soul-annihilating, wearying, life-swallowing sort of work. The opening poem ‘under the fridge magnet’ sets the tone ...

after 11 hours spent in the saddle
dodging trucks, cabbies
buses and pedestrians
breathing in Esso’s finest
trying to ignore
the snide comments of receptionists
whose packages have not arrived
on time
and whose lives now
will never be the same

after getting stuck in lifts
sworn at by disgruntled art designers
computer programmers, advertising reps
printers, typesetters
postroom managers
and some of the most beautiful women in the world

the last thing you want to do
is come home to find a note from your 3-year-long woman
pinned to the fridge under one of them smiley-faced magnets
telling you that she’s left
because she considers you a loser

Like the poems in Harmonica, Martin Hayes’ poems are all about fighting the nullifying effects of having a bloody awful job, they’re about finding a way of coming to terms with it by never coming to terms with it. But there are differences. Whereas it seems undeniably true that the ‘I’ in Harmonica is pretty much always Geoff Hattersley, the ‘you’ in Letting Loose the Hounds isn’t, I suspect, always Martin Hayes, or maybe not the current Martin Hayes, as is evidenced by that deliberately solecistic ‘them’ in the last stanza of the poem above. But I could be wrong.

Stylistically, this is a particularly mannered work. The poems rely for their ‘sense’ (as well as their intelligent & engaging ambiguity) on line breaks, using capital letters only where proper names are concerned & eschewing commasor stops at the ends of lines. This does, I think, enhance the effect that’s being reached for - of poems as notes taken on the hoof. There is an almost palpable urgency to the writing (& it is urgent, not hurried), a sort of paceyness that whisks the reader along. As a consequence, you might need to go back over the poems to appreciate some of the finer effects & nuances. But that’s okay, of course; after all, this is poetry.

And the poetry here is, if not in the pity, in the horror. There is a wincingness about the appalling yarns Martin Hayes spins in Letting Loose the Hounds; the prosaic bullying & cruelty, the ingrained inhumanity & plain ... well ... brutality, I suppose. He describes a world where the drive to make a profit just about wrings out every last drop of gentleness and humanity, a marketplace where the need to be a successful competitor leaves virtually no room for sentiment. The poem ‘terror street’ puts it like this ...

why must we move mountains
just to hold down council flats
so the roof isn’t ripped from us?
why must we be scared of the wind
and stuff our mouths full of cotton-wool
just so it can’t get in and freeze
our guts?

Whilst ‘our dignity’ (the poem that directly follows ‘terror street’) blows straight past the metaphorical stuff to offer ...

working in the controlrooms
next to each other
we take the piss out of the clothes we wear
we take the piss out of our new haircuts
we sneak up behind each other
and pull levers under our controllers’ chairs
just as we’re lifting scalding cups of coffee to our lips
we get our hands on photographs of each other’s girlfriends
cut and paste their heads on to pictures of girls
shoving cucumbers up their cunts

And that’s only for starters; it gets a great deal nastier. But the casual slide from schoolroom prankishness to obscene cruelty is shocking, isn’t it? The poem concludes ...

the amazing thing is though
in the sixteen years I’ve been a controller
not one of us has died at the hands of another

So, do I like Letting Loose the Hounds? I don’t know. In common with Harmonica it’s very easy to read & its grim scenes are compellingly rendered. Had I not been reviewing it, though, I think I might’ve been distracted by the sheer nastiness of the subject matter & missed some of the unquestionably sharp writing (which I know is my problem, not the book’s). And whilst there are occasional flickers of humour, it’s all a bit black & bleak, substituting the surreality of Geoff Hattersley for a sort of super-reality, a kind of ultra-clear focus. The danger here is that rather than getting the picture ‘warts and all’ we just get the warts, if you know what I mean. Or maybe I’m being too much of a big girl’s blouse. I think you should read it for yourself.

Speaking of big girls’ blouses ... here are a couple of girls without theirs:

Over shots of red wine, supper of baguette
and mussels, the fishermen are curious
about the visitors who occupy their island’s
only rentable cottage, Its long picture window
is a cinema screen, advertising a table, crowded
with artichokes, Muscadet, a box of camambert
from Normandy. Tonight, two young women,
two men, sit by the fire topless, playing cards.

That’s from ‘The Island of Curious Fishermen’ (& who could blame them) by Jackie Wills. Her book Fever Tree came out in 2003 from Arc, & it’s this collection I want to turn to now. One of Jackie Wills’ previous collections - Powder Tower (& for some reason I can’t help noticing those similar chiming vowel sounds - Powder Tower / Fever Tree) was something of a big hit, in asmall press sort of way; in fact it was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. She is clearly an experienced & well regarded writer & has done all those poet-in-residence things (Shoreham airport, the marketing offices of Lever Brothers etc.) that you & I have thought about packing in the day job for but got no farther than dreaming about. The blurb to Fever Tree also mentions the many & various places in which her poetry has appeared: paper napkins, t-shirts, BBC News on-line - which isn’t a guarantee of literary quality (I once had a poem in the Codnor Methodist Newsletter so I know whereof I speak), but it gives us some indication of her poetic pedigree. Her background is in journalism & this comes through in the reportage quality of a number of the poems. There are pieces about South Africa & the Sierra Nevada as well as poems about Brighton, poems that touch on displacement & ethnicity, the home & family. We get to cover a lot of ground. For my five cents, I’m not sure all of it is covered with equal degrees of success, but there is an undoubted tone of authority in her writing, a certainty in the way she handles language - which usually has the air of the authentically lived experience. Ian Pople puts it better & more succinctly than this rather rambling attempt when he writes (on the back cover of Fever Tree) of Jackie Wills’ ‘lush empathies’. Which is just right, I think.

Let’s get back to those curious fishermen for a moment. The excerpt
quoted above is certainly lush in its detail (even if it is a little overpunctuated in places). It goes on ...

The women are warming their breasts.
When they look out of the window
they don’t see the fishermen staring in,
hear breakers bang at the cliffs, they see
themselves, against the dark. A storm
brings the fishermen to look, while the men
stroke the women’s shoulders, and they take
on colours of fire, as if they could set light
to anything they come near. The fishermen,
though, own the sea, the night. They can pull
the sky down to cover them. They can drop a net
down to catch anything. Women and fire.

They’re warming their breasts? I flatter myself that I haven’t lived too sheltered a life, but surely if they were cold they’d just put their shirts back on, wouldn’t they? But hang on, maybe I’m getting distracted here... It’s certainly a strange story that’s being told; half real, half dream. It put me in mind of those rather darkly allegorical paintings by Paula Rego, which seem to trade in the similar mysteries of what I heard one enthusing art critic call ‘female energies’ , although I’m not entirely sure what they are.

Nonetheless there’s an undeniably strong element of ecriture feminine about Fever Tree and this does, of course, invite comparison with the foremost British exponent of that genre, Selima Hill. Here’s Jackie Wills’ poem ‘Sleep’:

I worry when the fridge is empty,
the washing basket’s full
and going mouldy underneath.
I keep forgetting to ring
the cooker repair man,
fix fire alarms to the ceiling.
I hoover only when dust collects
under the sofa and on the stairs.
I think in lists - dates
when I should be doing something else.
Most of the time I think of sleep,
tantalising as the soft, loose neck
of a golden retriever. I could grab
it now, stroke the reliable head
let it lick my hand.

Which is very Selima Hill-ish, I think you’ll agree. My guess is she would have stopped the poem at ‘...golden retriver’ & simply let that lush, tactile image resonate in the imagination. In common with Selima Hill, Jackie Wills also explores ‘the-investing-of-the-mundane-with-the-visionary’ territory, but sometimes gets a little lost along the way. Or maybe it’s just a different aesthetic, a different music she’s aiming for. (Oh & I know this isn’t strictly lit. crit., but I have to mention it now I’ve noticed it: isn’t it smoke alarms you’re supposed to fix to the ceiling?)

There are some difinitely stylish poems in Fever Tree - not all to my taste, but stylish all the same. There isn’t much of what I could recognise as wit or humour, which is something I like in a poem, but thankfully there aren’t any laws about that sort of thing, just yet. And I was mildly exasperated by what has become the almost obligatory & deeply tiresome early-in-themorning- the-kids-come-into-our-bed-&-I-discover-how-much-I-love-them poem. But perhaps that’s just me being grumpy. Page for page, there’s a lot to enjoy in Fever Tree & if you liked the two poems I’ve quoted, then you’ll almost certainly like the rest of the book.

So that’s it: my choice from the Alt. Gen. roster which - it hardly needs to be said but I’m still going to say it - showcases an inspiring diversity of poetic voices. We know it’s always a bad time for poetry: not enough people buy it; bookshops don’t stock enough of what little there is; little magazines are always folding; the big publishing houses are forever explaining why they can’t afford to subsidise something as unpopular as contemporary verse etc. - but somehow poetry survives. And it survives because it’s at the very roots of language & culture. So do yourself a favour, do us all a favour, do culture a favour, go out & buy some. You know it makes sense.