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

     It’s good to welcome Gael Turnbull back to the publishing scene with his Migrant Press. For those of you who’ve not heard of Migrant, a little history might be in order.

     Migrant came to life in the late 50s and early 60s, and persisted until the middle of the decade. It was the nearest Britain had come to a really influential, innovative, small press & magazine for a long time. It served to introduce members of the so-called Black Mountain school to the public on the other side of the Atlantic, and, still more imporatnt, to lay the foundation stones for a few interesting British careers - Turnbull himself, and also Roy Fisher, Matthew Mead and Michael Shayer, all of whom were to produce very fine work in the late 60s and 70s.

     Migrant’s new clutch of publications are of varying quality, and I regret that the best of them, Turnbull’s selection of 23 poems from his work to date, is not on sale to the public. (It’s for private distribution only) Of the rest, Mel Hardiment’s Doazy Bor (11), and Philip Sharpe’s Dog-days are reviewed elsewhere in this issue, so I’ll not say anything about them other than the fact that the Hardiment volume is the best-produced of the batch, no doubt because it was a grant-aided volume.

     That leaves me with 2 books and 2 cards:

Omar Pound : Corby & the Rats (£0.75)
Omar Pound : By Order (£0.20)
Adele David : Becoming (£1)
Tony Harrison & Philip Sharpe : Looking Up (£0.25)

     The Pound translation of a 14th century parodistic epic is a tour-de-force of narrative verse. The story of a splendid & fearsome cat who outwits, & eats, most of his enemies. It’s a bit like Gulliver in that, on one level, it’s a cracking good tale for kids, while still being a murderous satire on the other. Persian kids apparently love it (though presumably not little ayatollahs), and I would have thought most Western kids would lap it up. Can’t recommend it highly enough - & the more so with that splendid prowling feline on the cover.

     By Order is a poem-card - a found poem in fact, being a translation of a notice board on the road from Tokyo to Mishima. It’s excellent, most amusing, & I won’t quote it in case I give the game away. Recommended.

     Adele David’s first book is nicely produced, but I’m afraid the contents are strictly third-rate - the kind of poems one expects to hear at a mothers’ union read-in. They’re innocuous enough but utterly unmemorable.

     The Sharpe/Harrison poem card consists of 2 poems in honour of Peter Mark Roget, the Thesaurus man, but the poets address their works to each other. I’m afraid I found both poems horrendous. This is Harrison :-

Bar a farmhouse tv aerial or two,
the odd red bus, the red post office van,
this must have been exactly Roget’s view,
good Dr. Roget, the Thesaurus man.

and Sharpe :-

I stare out west till the set sun splutters,
look at you, your photos, both depressed
by some blind finger on life’s light shutter,
watch darkness and silence capture the rest.

Which all goes to show that occasional, tributary verse can be just as bad by unknowns as by the poet laureate.

     For what it s worth I enjoyed the Mel Hardiment volume, but not Philip Sharpe’s Dog-days. Further comment I leave to Martin Anderson.