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

I faced the same invidious choice as Ken Jones in the last issue between several meritorious haiku (including, to be piddling, one senryu), fearing that the reasons for knocking them down, till only one was left, would be negative ones. I’ll let you judge how negative I was.

As a one-time family history buff I was drawn to Carolyn Hall’s

unlabelled photos
both sides of the family
disavowing such kin

This has enduring relevance to the experience of so many of us (No, dear, there were never any Neanderthalers in our family!)

My flickering eye was keen to find something, if possible, that revealed an ‘emerging talent’, or stretched haiku and/or the reader a bit beyond the usual. I’m afraid it didn’t really find anything. David Steele’s ingenious poem came closest: -

stuck to the slab  
the         I
of the frozen f sh

This intrigues, because we can never be sure whether the ‘I’ was print or flesh. It works on two different levels of humour, the whimsical and the grotesque. But in the end I concluded that, however successful as a one-off, it wasn’t going to open new doors.

I was now down to three. Andrew Detheridge’s

quiet enough
to hear the squirrel
change its grip

encapsulates silence in one crisp detail, but does it tell us more about the squirrel or the man?  Heather Kirk splashes us with colour: -  

crimson 
          wings 
               alight on lavender

and John McDonald warms us with humanity: -

Concave
   against the baby’s head:
      the mother’s cheek.

I looked at the calendar. It was a couple of days before Christmas, the season of babyhood and motherhood.  Timing got John my vote.