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

Writing is alive and well within these pages – not the book-chains’ boring diet of misery memoirs and true crime but real, truthful writing that catches the grit and the grain of life, the light and the dark. Here is writing that matters: new and original matter, matter that adds to the world. Its creators have trawled their lives for things worth sharing with others. They are truth-tellers, even when the truths are disguised as fiction or poetry, and they want to talk to you.

So much to enjoy here. If you have picked up the book to dip, buy it at once! Enter the strange but entirely believable island world of Helen Cadbury’s ‘Sal and the Flood Pirates’. A caste of divers have grown greedy and threatening: a dead diver is hauled out of the sea, ‘the eye mask and the breathing tube... connected together like the face of a giant fly. I slid my fingers under the cold rubber and eased the whole piece away from the man’s face. Underneath, his skin was white. Just as I was about to touch his cheek, the diver’s eyes flashed open... he lurched over and threw up onto the mud.’ Who is this stranger? And what has happened to the island’s children? Louise Wilford’s ‘Finding the Four Quartets’ is totally different, delicate and elegiac. The woman in her poem has never read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets but she has kept the faded blue book that includes it for twenty years because a man once wrote ‘Love you’ on the page. She makes us think about the difference between poetry in books and the sadder, sometimes more enduring poetry of real life. Or there’s Kate Hainsworth’s sensual, sexual ‘Harry Rampant’, plunging us into a vivid daydream of Oxo mince and Rizlas, plate-throwing and incest. A striking poem by Fay Musselwhite took me back to the marvellous rhythms of Beowulf and Old English, when bards used everything the language offers – alliteration, half-rhyme – to make their words memorable to the listeners round the fire. Her poem, ‘Impasse’, begins like this, not wasting a word:

The bone in her heart grows up past her throat
crackles its chill in her
                                       stone cold cheek
she can’t talk it away so she walks it
down by the river’s raw bite.

And then there are the guest stars, including the wonderful Adam Marek, whose story-telling I once described as ‘funny and fabulously meaty’, and Alison MacLeod reporting from beside Sylvia Plath’s grave, picking up her heroine’s deliciously subversive voice from the Other Side through the silvery hum of a dirty wine-glass. Julia Copus will haunt you with her troubling image of lovers lying on the lawn outside a long-ago house, flat on their backs looking up at the moon:

Something about the way the light has fallen,
or the way their outstretched hands seem fastened,
each to each, like two cut-paper dolls,
tells me it’s already too late to warn them…

Sheffield Hallam’s Rebecca Swirsky ends her piece with her central figure ‘still and quiet as a question mark’ – a skilful contradiction in terms, for though a question mark might look motionless, it has disturbing energy and power.

These are all real writers, doing what they do best: disturbing us, energising us, powering our dreams, making us feel more alive in the way good writing should.