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

This collects texts first appearing in smaller books and collected now from over a decade’s harvest (the book is slim – 66 pages – suggesting painstaking composition). Sometimes Manson appears to be a snippet-collagist whose cut-ups reach towards and achieve an almost unifying grand rhetoric. A paradox there. How to explain this: poetic drama? Jacobean heart-in-the-mouth? French abstraction? Beckettian physicality? Peter Manson’s interest in many different modes of avant-garde process leads a branch on the Rock family tree to point back up to Edwin Morgan. Like Morgan’s, Manson’s procedural poems, such as the two or three that pursue a phonetic analogue to Schönberg’s chromatic serial music, produce surprisingly sociable poems from the set parameters. (I shouldn’t be surprised – it’s only form, but I like it). This is also true for his impressive prosework Adjunct, an autobiography with cactuses, published in 2005 and for, say,  Peter McCarey’s large-scale  and also phonetic project The Syllabary. I immediately think, too, of Drew Milne, Fiona Templeton, and Rob Mackenzie (of off Ardglas) as being part of a Scottish avant-garde to which Manson belongs: they may not at all be affiliated to each other, but their explorations join them. In England, Allen Fisher, Elizabeth James (who Manson has collaborated with), and Karlien van den Beukel come roughly enough to mind. This is a fascinating but puzzling book: I simply cannot understand poems here, such is the colloid of physicality suspended in abstraction in some of these texts. You more have to drink them than think them. Perhaps the collection can be a little dour and melancholy at times, though that is to declare my own prejudice and possible sense of humour failure (I think this is to do with the poems’ grim (funny?) sense of the body, and the pervasive and delicate feeling of elegy, but I really may be underestimating the comedy). This is a book very much to revisit.