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

Andy Croft, Comrade Laughter, 2004
Flambard, Stable Cottage, East Fourstones, Hexham, NE47 5DX
Graham Mort, A Night on the Lash, 2004
Seren, Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3BN
Tamar Yoseloff, Barnard’s Star, 2004
Enitharmon Press, 26B Caversham Road, London NW5 2DU
Anne Rouse, The School of Night, 2004
Bloodaxe, High Green, Tarset, Northumberland, NE48 1RP

As I write this review, an election is looming. By the time you read
it, you’ll know the outcome. But the limbo in which I have been
reading these books somehow feels appropriate to their poetic
worlds where so many visions prove illusory.
  
   Andy Croft’s book is the most explicitly political. it also focuses
on the particular political nonsenses of our time – this new century

   ... like a spaceship where the crew
   Have all been eaten up by God knows what,
   Adrift in space, we don’t know what to do’
               (from ‘Letter to Randall Swingler Part II’)

   One thing to do is laugh. But beware. As the title poem warns:
‘..the joke’s on us these days’

   And if you think this means we’re cheerful
   I am afraid you risk a tearful
   earful.

   So although the predominant style is one that normally trades
under the title ‘light verse’, this is clearly something else. Yes,
there is marvellous humour – indeed humour is one of the book’s
preoccupations – but the purpose is essentially serious. Laughter is
examined as a means not only of delivering poetry, but of living. It’s
a means of examining the the world around us where ‘what we call
Reality’s another/ New series of Celebrity Big Brother.’ The poems
here, even the very short ones which punctuate the book, are as
throw‑away as handfuls of water in the desert. And how they put to
shame so much of what passes as political performance poetry.
  
   The book’s considerable edge comes both through intellectual
rigour and through its astonishing craft. the relentless inventiveness
of the rhymes is alone worth praise (and who could fail to admire
poetry which rhymes ‘Dubya’ with ‘grubbier’?). You might imagine
that the preferred rhythm and rhyming scheme becomes tedious,
but not for a minute. It’s an elegant rant from start to finish. It’s hard
to single out favourite poems, but the ‘Letter to Randall Swingler
Part II’ is worthy of special note, as is ‘Yooman’, a comic tour de
force with a genuinely moving conclusion. Not for a moment did I feel I had had enough of this book, that I could resist the next poem. Spend £7.50 and treat yourself to nearly a hundred pages of
‘Yoomanity’ at its best.

   The political references in Graham Mort’s new book, A Night on the Lash, are more oblique. They are not so much the focus, more a part of the dark and disturbing texture of the world observed. This is a difficult book, though I mean that in a positive sense. It stares at the bleaker aspects of life, so it’s not exactly a comfortable read. It’s also very dark, both emotionally and literally. It’s like watching a film shot in very low lighting conditions, so that sometimes you aren’t entirely sure of what is happening, but are affected by the atmosphere.  At the same time, there is something almost forensic about the accumulation of detail. Mort uses the word himself, ‘watching/ a fox redden the golf course, rooks gathering/ for early mass, a girl’s stark body rolled// from a car into the future’s chilled forensics.’
  
   There are lighter moments, though they are few and far between, and in unlikely places, such as ‘Batsville’:

   More Harpicide than homicide, she cracked,
   adding that lacking a bat‑slice she’d fished
   it from the pan, dried it on a windowsill until
   it twitched alive, each moment of resurrection
   inching it from light.

   There are frequent allusions to new beginnings, versions of rebirth, often bleak. In ‘Prodigal’, ‘lives resume, grow back towards
themselves/ the way house‑plants grope for light.’ Sometimes it’s
merely a matter of reprieve: ‘shots of liquid oxygen to cheer us
through eternal nights’ (from ‘Prohibition’).
  
   As one would expect from Graham Mort, the use of language
is trenchant and the imagery inventive: the orange moon clearing
‘like lipstick smeared from a mirror’ (from ‘Eclipse’); the woman in
‘Heirlooms’ clasping pearls ‘the way mushrooms/ glow in the roots
of trees at dusk’. The title poem provides variations on the use of the word ‘lash’: ‘born to the manner, the lash’; the lash cracks rain on glass’; ‘the lash coiling, her tongue dipping’; ‘the lads…in a line…lashing the porcelain’; ‘they lash down a pint’; ‘the lash of fuchsia lips’.
  
   ’Where to, love?’ asks the taxi driver in this poem. It’s a question
which other poems ask repeatedly, and the answers implied are
sombre variations on a theme. The sequence of poems with which
the book concludes, ‘Cuba Libra at the Café España’, seems to
offer a brighter vision. These poems are certainly more relaxed – ‘a
salvation of calm’ – but they too circle back to ‘yorkshire towns and
hills, their stone capes drawn tight against rain/ and too much hope’.

Among the many ghosts inhabiting Tamar Yoseloff’s book, Barnard’s Star, are some of the same creatures from ‘A Night on the Lash’. (What is the probability of finding bats and moths so prominent?!) And Yoseloff lets some of her ghosts drift from one poem to another (eels in a woman’s dream popping up again as a ‘stack of eels at the Rialto’ in a poem about Venice).
  
   The language is much lighter than Mort’s, aiming for a disquieting
calm. The poems are keen on catching the ephemeral – ‘moths,
illuminated as they are caught/ fluttering towards the headlights’ –
and toying with what is or isn’t gleaned, or comparing what you see
with what can only be imagined (‘flatbed trucks/ holding cargoes we
will never know’). Yoseloff resists the notion of anything being quite
tangible. In a graveyard, each stone is ‘a marker for a man’. She is
interested in context (‘You make more sense in rain’) and dislocation
– the ultimate dislocation being death. Indeed, the relationship
between the living and the dead emerges as the principal theme,
hence the proliferation of ghosts.
  
   Ghosts of course can be real people. Most haunting are the
couple in ‘The Atlantic at Ashbury Park’:

                                  ... like the elders
   in some book. they sat in flowered armchairs
   all evening and never spoke.

   And perhaps the best ghosts here are those of the self – the self
of earlier times. ‘Partobar’, for instance, is a marvellous depiction
of how humiliation can last a lifetime. For me, the strongest poem
is ‘Operation’, featuring a father’s recovery in hospital. The conceit
(involving the ubiquitous board game) is perfectly realized, the
language is vivid, and the simple ending carries an emotional punch:

   I wanted to put him back together the way he was
   when he was young, a superhero, perfect and whole.

And so to the last of these shadowy worlds. Anne Rouse actually
includes a poem called ‘Shadow Book’, which I feel could well have
been the title poem, especially as it’s one of the very best in the
collection. As it is, The School of Night is divided into four sections
(‘Dusk’, Midnight’, ‘Small Hours’, ‘Morning’), though interestingly, these sections are defined only under Contents, not within the main text.  All the poems are short, with only two exceptions confined to a single page. And they chart small moments – people passing in the street, a station bar closing – nevertheless rich with unusual detail or phrasing.
  
   Darkness predominates, and it’s populated with creatures both real and mythological, ‘athletic gangsters and the beasts of nightmare’. But even within the darkness, there is humour. ‘Lucifer,
Baby’ gives us ‘the slur/ of treacle over answerphones...// the skull in
a builder’s skip.’ ‘Mrs Hues’ is a highwaywoman

   ... not a girl on the razzle, a craver of thrills,
   a vendeuse of nocturnal wares, but a bold heart, and a lover
   of Mr Hues, who would sit by a guttering hearth
   over a hot posset, and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield,
   awaiting the distant tuppety tuppety of hooves.

   The poems have a satisfying sense of rhythm and movement
within the lines, and overall poise. Sometimes I feel they try a little
too hard to distill their materials into something absolute. There is
perhaps an over‑deliberate distinction made between things seen
and experienced in other ways. As the first poem, ‘The Elements’,
says: ‘...mind is more than merely eye./ Mind is also fingers, primed/ at once to manoeuvre, and move.’ Given this statement, it’s surprising that verbless clauses tend to pile up a little heavily.
‘Tyrannosaurus’ begins entirely verbless, ‘dead calm’, but when a
verb does emerge (‘dervishes’), it’s admittedly worth the wait. this
unusual use of verbs is evident elsewhere, for instance ‘birthmarks’
in the poem ‘Cliff Walking’.
  
   As with Graham Mort’s poems, it feels as if we are struggling
towards dawn, surviving a sequence of shadows and terrors. It is
probably inevitable that the ‘morning’ feels less alluring than the
surreal dark. This is most noticeable in ‘The Good Weekend’, where the specific, named locations come across as somewhat banal. Perhaps though, this is the point. Perhaps, as suggested by the
other poets here, our awakenings and intimations of rebirth are but
temporary reprieve, false dawns after all.