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

Anne Beresford is one of our finest poets, and of course one seldom hears about her. She’s not exactly neglected, for this is her twelfth book. Discerning editors have spotted her quality - the newness of being herself, with her own slant on everything, the right simple words for it, and a persona worth knowing.

     She opens with disarmingly limpid statements that take off laterally to implications you can’t quite define but understand subliminally.

     The poems are wholes and difficult to quote. This short one, far from showing her power, does show her pervasive humour and love of paradox.

He told me:
‘You could knock me down with a feather.’
So I did.
Not a large feather
not an ostrich or a peacock
more the size of an owl’s.

What people say
or what they mean
is often questionable.
Taking him at his word
came as a shock to him
so when I turned my cheek
he hit the other one.

     A surrealistic poem can have mystical and political overtones. Two men and a woman plot to buy hell... “The media will have you believe that hell is pit of fire with a great many naked imps ready to prod in awkward places”, but “as always that’s the sensational part”. You have to “read between the flames”. Sometimes the poems are dreams, left uninterpreted - ending, for instance:

...An old French lady tells me
she has enjoyed her visit
she offers me a box of half-eaten chocolates
then she adjusts her hat
and seems to evaporate
between two beds and a table.

     But there’s a general air of lucid dream, implying that, in our world of consciousness, waking is another mode of dream.

     Eros is always edge-on to her poems “with the loneliness love inevitably brings”. “With a look” Aphrodite can “shatter more than Troy”. We’re in “a world of human horror and a perfection beyond words”, the great emptiness where “silence stands on the point of a needle”. Jairu’s daughter, whom Christ raised from the dead, meets the resurrected Lazarus and “our pain mingled in an olive grove”. “We had no need to speak...”

It is not forbidden
to go from dark to light
or light to dark
but not encouraged
till the right time...

     ‘Encounter with Hermes’ and ‘Crossing Over’ suggest why she writes as if she were a Cumaean sibyl who has met the Shining Ones but has not lost her sense of fun and absurdity. If you’re serious about poetry or think poetry has to be aware of other dimensions, for it not to be merely verse, you might also want to borrow or buy Landscape with Figures (Agenda Editions, £6.00) as well.