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

This is exuberant prolific writing from someone who lives and feels strongly. But he does write a lot. The collection of selected and new poems contains at least 201 poems, not to mention the essay on poetry that launches it. If I must choose between the polar opposites of poetry paralysed by formal preoccupation, its emotional impulse hard to detect, and the exuberant pouring out from an enthusiastic poet, I’d choose the latter. But I hope not to have to choose. This collection is exuberant. A lot of it shows the damage exuberance creates - hasty, slap dash work grabbing at imagery that misses: “hacked out a blunt idea and kissed it until it bled”; taking refuge in portentous statements as substitute for thought: “Nothing travels so well in the memory as/ tough reality. The token wobbles, falls over/ and a doubt falls out” from ‘Somewhere they are Trains’; “Performance and attitude. How long do/ your worries get before you reject them?/ So many crowns and crowds of doubts”. Having a go at tricky lineation (rather than looking critically at existing line patterns - if there are any), lines here that produce too many messy poems to quote. The will to poetry may be strong but the commitment to its subtle techniques is not. He says it himself in ‘The Fiction Enters’: “The powerhouse of poetry dumps something dazzling in your mind and away you go”.

     The lack of attention and patience harms not only poetry as an art but also the development of the poet’s gift. These poems are gathered from 30 years work but it’s hard to see any development over this period. The fine poems, (and there are fine poems, and very many potentially fine poems) and complex ideas mostly rendered obscure by the lack of patience to express them clearly, are hidden within this profusion. Grubb writes too much. Many themes - memories of dead parents, religious epiphanies in odd settings, suffering in terrible places, reflections on the times - are treated over and over again, but always, it seems, in a terrible hurry. What a pity! When he sits down to contemplate his topic, as in ‘Six Poems for my Father’, each one is a painfully vivid and luminous display of a memory (and of poetry).