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

“We write these fictions into our lives for our protection... What is really remembered? Something young and desolately commonplace”, Colin Thubron’s epigraph to, ‘A Death in the Family’, could stand for the whole book. The writing offers us versions of a life in a style that is economical, witty and observant. An habitual and natural emotional delicacy covers the more primitive emotions that thrive below the Carver-like (though English here and upper middle class) surface. There are glimpses of impending dissolution, and a feeling that what matters is not what’s said, but what’s left unsaid:

...Then we formed a queue

to hold and kiss her goodnight, the eldest first.
When I woke the next morning I could tell
                                                   something
had happened by the silence in the house
as though snow had fallen outside.

     The book, in 3 parts covering childhood, school and married life, grows increasingly light in tone - in ‘Basil and Chopped Tomatoes’, for example, Liz Lochhead’s complaint about Lifestyle as subject matter, is humorously taken to task - but the earlier feelings of passivity and powerlessness seep through to undermine the surface sense of domestic security. From ‘Home’:

We drink out of bowls
And we eat off a table that shines.
We have made this and this is our home.

We live here now and everything is going to
                                                         be fine.

     By the end we have begun to sense the full complexity and mystery of, “a two-faced story” whose, “shine is for keeping hidden in drawers...” (from ‘Coin’).