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

Dress of Nettles
Ragged Raven Press, 1 Lodge Farm, Snitterfield, Warwickshire, CV37 0LR www.raggedraven.co.uk ISBN 0 9542397 5 X, A5 pbck 94pp £6.00

As long as there are poetry competitions there are going to be anthologies like this. Get used to it, it's a fact of life. Compared to some of the tatty, badly printed, held together by one staple anthologies I have seen (and regrettably appeared in), this one is extremely well produced. Good production however does not guarantee good poetry. Surely the sole reason for producing any book of poetry is to offer the public the best poetry possible. This anthology sums up so much of what is wrong with modern English poetry. If you haven't guessed by now I am in full agreement with Nigel Rushbrook's comments in issue 11 of The Journal.

   Here we have an almost total lack of imagination with poets and poems that do not make the best use of their material. In fact some poems seem to have dispensed with material all together. Far too many of these poems suffer from Creative Writing Exercise syndrome where the poet has forgotten that the object of writing exercises is to exercise the brain, that they are just warm-ups for the real work that has to be done. Too often exercises are published as finished work. Reportage also rears its ugly head. Jaclyn Hagen's 'Newts were banned in our House' is not a story of anarchic, delinquent newts, just a facile report of growing up that ends with the weak line 'Now I'm banned in our house'.

   There is too much repetition here. 'From The Archives' by Pat Watson and 'Bought cakes' by Pat Borthwick are both supposed transcripts or accounts of interviews with presumably senior citizens. The two poems by David H W Grubb, the competition winner, both contain references to robins, one of which is inaccurate. Jane Kinninmont's 'Advice Machine' and Charles Bennett's 'Object Lessons' are just lists of quasi-Gnostic statements that supposedly offer good advice. Kinninmont hits the mark with one line,

                  In telling a story, ask about the
     circumstances of its birth.

The rest, and all five pages of Bennett's poem verge on drivel. An example of Bennett's wisdom is

                       Some
                  Tins of soup in the cupboard are always a
     useful standby

Other poems seem to lose their inner consistency. At the beginning of 'Prawn vol-au-vents' Graham Clifford assures us that

                  Prawn vol-au-vents were the bee's-knees in
     hors d'ouvres

but later they are downgraded somewhat

                  Prawn vol-au-vents were second only to
                  bloated avocados

This anthology contains some competition entries and some material from invited poets. Apart from a list of the competition winner and four runners-up, we are not told what is competition material and what is there by invitation. There is no mention of who judged the competition or who selected the invited material, presumably the responsibility and the blame must go to the powers that be at Ragged Raven, which is in some degree a shame because they obviously know how to package and produce good books, they just need better raw material.