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

This is an interesting first collection. Henry Shukman writes good, straightforward poems about a variety of subjects, ranging from boyhood experiences to the world of work and the different kinds of people one encounters along the way. He’s able to suggest deeper meanings through descriptions of people and places and events that are seemingly fairly ordinary and, in doing so, he shows how the truly significant often occurs in the obvious. A fine poem called ‘Sunday’, which subtly touches on the intricacies of personal relationships, points to the unease which can easily take over and destroy what could be:

A walk in the park where I walked as a kid -
same trees, same river, same pond with ducks -
a pleasant walk, but me thinking: why
isn’t this enough, in fact it is enough,
to expect more is a ticket to misery.

It’s relaxed writing, though not to the extent that it loses its accuracy, and what the poem is saying is never held up by the eccentricities of technique. Shukman lets his lines break naturally so that they push the meaning along in an easy manner. Each poem tells a story and if some are more interesting than others they all have the capacity to hold the reader’s attention. A friendly taxi-driver in America, an incident during the Blitz, incidents when working on a trawler, someone indulging themselves on an expense account, and memories of a father who was, in his own estimation, “important in some circles”, are all dealt with skilfully. And Shukman is especially effective at getting directly into a poem so that the reader immediately starts to form a picture in the mind:

We worked at night in Paul’s garage under
a bare bulb, me on my Puch, he on his
                                                        Triumph.
From his cartridge deck pedal-steel twanged,
Tammy and George wailed in the rafters.
He called me Badger, I never knew why.

     There are a couple of poems which don’t seem to me to work too well (‘Ararat’, in particular) but on the whole I found myself engaged by what Shukman writes about. He may not be breaking any new ground but he knows how to get something from the existing landscape.