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

Mephisto is a circus magician who performs his mesmeric tricks on the stage of the ‘Theatre of Hate’ (cf. ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’). He hawks a patent medicine called ‘Hermes Lives’, concocted from turps substitute, lighter fluid, de-icer, cum, and various other sickeners, and sleeps wrapped in cellophane among wax shapes and his usual furniture of sputum, vomit and crap. He is evidently a trope for the current weltanschauung.

     Recreating a goldmine, an apt circle of Hell, he’s also creating a trope for the destructive greed and wealth of the consumer West - “the spiralling circles of my crawling brothers in the mud... I can see shining teeth in the mud of my dreams... My eyes are grey, my face is grey, even my prick is grey when I take a piss... Sebastião, my riches are nothing but the beauty of damnation...” There are several references to Dante but the book is an Inferno without a Purgatorio or Paradiso.

     Emery claims there is no official meaning, but the above seems to be distinctly there. Stylistically the book is a Swiftian morass of misanthropy and disgust.

Take heed and wash
your feet in urine; make this last week’s bread
with powdered mandrake, beetle dust and
                                                     menstrual
blood from eighteen nubile lauded pigs.

     It’s certainly true that our world of globalised starvation, oil wars, profitable sale of weapons of mass destruction (to countries we’ll soon be at costly war with, without our vote), investment in ecological devastation, and the pot-and-kettle corruption of language like ‘good’, ‘evil’, and ‘terrorism’ deserves the persona’s oblique diatribe, but I found eighty pages of it wearying. I need an ounce of civet to sweeten my imagination. I also found it repetitive and heavy-handed. Nevertheless, the book comes with high praise from Drew Milne, “things really catch light when the lines go lyrical”; John Hartley Williams, “He has an attack vocabulary and has the ambition to think the unthinkable”; and Richard Caddell, “a developmental writer of growing stature”. All this is true.