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

One book I’m very eager to read is Julia Lewis’ first collection of poetry. It hasn’t been published yet but I hope it will be soon.

   There are poets whom I love because I find their work intellectually challenging; there are poets whose work is so musical, and beautiful because of it, that it sings to me; there are poets that love language deeply and pass that love onto me as I read them, and there are poets that have such a spiritual engagement with their subject that I can’t help but be touched by it myself. Julia’s poetry is all of these things. She is a writer who understands instinctively the emotional tone and weight a poem needs – the playful delicacy of ‘Moon River’ as a relay between three pianola rolls is a gorgeous
example in which she reclaims the cliché of the song, made so famous by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and permits it (and us) its sadness and sentimentality by giving it to a machine that doesn’t need a pianist to play it. She makes us question what we understand as ‘sentimentality’. To make sense of it, you must read it from bottom to top, over three columns – you have to spend time with the words, and yet, at the same time, the poem is strangely more fluid than you remember the song to be.

   I could write a whole on essay on how wonderful these poems are and talk about Julia’s sensitive ear for the cadence of the words she chooses, or her subtle and elegant use of form, or how you carry the poems around with you – in your mind, your blood – after you’ve read them, but I’m afraid I don’t have the space to do so here. All I can hope is that you enjoy reading them as much as I do, so that you’ll also look forward to her first collection being published.