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

Tolkien, with a sensibility rather like Edward Thomas’s, has a knowledge of birds and wild plants rare nowadays, though it’s never flourished; but he has a trained eye on our contemporary creation of poisoned landscapes.

I find spent cartridges, their precision-kill
codes mellowing to ochre, flesh-rose, sepia, jade.
The anger can’t quite drown out the feeling
for beauty.

     The book’s four parts are really sequences, preoccupied with rootedness, relationships, escape, and the imponderable.

     The relationships include close ones - a daughter with seeing difficulties - but recognition of our more distant and difficult siblings:

At playtime he moons about kicking stones
or sucks up to younger lads, punching
chirpy ones who make him feel a fool.

     “ ‘Don’t pick on me you fucking wanker,’/ he warns teachers... His dad’s doing eighteen months/ for interfering with him...” For “a sister he defends like a mastiff/ It was all they could do to stop him choking/ a girl who started slagging her off”.

     His style, stripped of ornament, clipped to classical realism, with its sharp eye on actuality, is an implicit statement of taste:

Even walking this sandy heath
can’t wash us clean
of the same old poets...

     There’s been an increasing flintiness in Tolkien’s work since his earlier publications. It suggests a tight-lipped rage at how we let our  illusory ‘real world’ worsen. There’s no political view evident, though. The work is the work of consciousness. The poems go very close to reporting, without ever losing the presence of personality of deft turn of phrase:

This strong coffee tastes of you.
Sharing it we feel our elbows
meet across the beach bar...

     As for ‘escape’, there’s little escape: it is, rather, disgust with the escapes offered: ‘Hotel Paradiso’, ‘Bonanza Packages’, the consumer consolations offered by a fast-buck society whose chief product is money. Yet the possibility of “outstripping gravity” isn’t completely absent from the modern world. The death of a brother-in-law hang-gliding is a hint that “there’s more to flight than flying”. A spiritual search is picking its way through, not only the junk-thought and junk-objects we’re bombarded with, but the authentic difficulties of finding meaning. Not completely in vain: even under “the blow a real agnostic land you/ in fair and square vernacular” something of “the imponderable” burns and ferments behind the inner doors. And these finely-wrought poems are a model of how reserve can convey a white passion.