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

These are poems of rural life in Australia (for the most part) but so far removed from anything pastoral or lyric it’s hard to detect the poetic stance behind them. One is plunged immediately into close, eye-level encounters with the grit of machinery, the business in hand, the ever-present danger of Nature on that continent. His objectivity is thorough, unremittingly so:

The warped screens of a seed cleaner
buried to the knees in clay and salt, snake their
way up towards the stunted fruit trees’
low-slung fruit like apodal spirits in a
venomous light - winter at their heels.

The density of the detail and the manic profusion of words makes it hard for this reader, stranger to such a setting, to get a view, to get the context. This density often obscures the shape and pace of a poem too. It is only well into the collection that he does stand up, open out and allow more space for the uninitiated reader to take stock. I feel that the collection would gain greatly from a re-ordering of the poems. If we were ushered into the more spacious picture, (for example, the poem ‘Rich soil, the mechanism: a farm is sold’) before getting enmeshed in close-ups we’d be better primed to appreciate the power of the writing.

     Such detachment as this permits little of mood, little of the poet’s involvement in this stark and essential world; only well into the collection in poems like ‘Early Morning’ and ‘Autumn Landscape’ and ‘Ice’ do I sense the poet’s human presence. How much of this touch stance is part of outback Australia and how much the poet’s personal stance is hard to judge. Nevertheless coming to the end there accumulates a powerful sense of heat, of harshness, of the muscular quality of the talk, of a sensibility conditioned by an extraordinary environment.