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

Minhinnick, editor of Poetry Wales and a founding member of Friends of the Earth Cymru, can have a delightful lightness of touch about his ecological worries, as his short allegory ‘Pansy’ shows:

Life was so simple then, didn’t know I was born,
A well-kept border round a new-mown lawn,
Slug pellets scattered like small sapphire stones,
Then she sews me on her knickers and throws
me at Tom Jones.

But he can be economically severe too, as in ‘Twenty-five Laments for Iraq’.

These soldiers will not marry.
They are betrothed already
To the daughters of Uranium.

It doesn’t stop him spotting life’s own ironies:

While we are filming the sick child
The sick child behind us
Dies. And as we turn our camera
The family group smartens itself
As if grieving might offend.

He prefers truth to perfecting a poem, he says, but his poems, though very close to prose statements, are very passionately written. His passion for the environment is an obsession, but not his one theme. It goes with his informed love of nature, his ability to evoke it, and a preoccupation with language - “how we speak is how we live” - and what life is for, and what death is.

     I like his raven - “a ruffian in a long black coat”. He has travelled to places one has never heard of and understood their ecology. He sits in uneasily on the poisoning of coyotes - “sons of bitches, you said”, “eyes you should never look into: / They would screw the farmdogs, kill the birds”. Almost apologising for a spontaneous prayer in a candle-rich church, he finds a man outside in the street selling candles for “a sidewalk dollar” - “My last chance of holding a candle up”. It suggests a religious sensibility finding what devotion it can in care for a planet dying of buying and selling. He knows “there is an apocalypse within he rock pool”, and he knows how to observe it. He has held a microphone to the water, and now he can play the sea at night. He listens with feeling, imagination and insight.