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

Leah Fritz, “born where skyscrapers supplant what’s left/ of trees” and domiciled in Britain, sees herself as concentrating “on love that perishes with lingerie/ circling in the automatic, cars/ and people crashing...” She goes to a banker’s party:

And while I munched on vol-au-vent I heard
two men in earnest dialogue. One said,
‘The part of the bank I work for is the part
that dispossesses when the bill’s not paid.’...

...Down the street young women are in
                                                        business.
Just a shade more beautiful than most,
their eyes are not, as you imagine, bold.
They tend to turn away...

“After all, this is a residential neighbourhood.” Painters, snooker-players, poets are “chary of being born again in fire”. She wonders “why they choose the ones they choose”. There was a young woman who was beautiful, had her ups and downs, did her best (and was, no doubt, a princess) and died. Here she gets probably the correct laconic cliches:

When she died, the whole world had a damn
                                                        good cry.
Poor woman.                              Poor world.

     As Fritz says, “I avoid/ all reference to tenderness, to what/ they used to call the soul...”Lost in a “tricky life” that’s lost the possibility of meaning, in “love’s exciting imitation”, she finds, ironically, “Next door to the wilderness is heaven”.

     People die, prolonging the rite, of diseases that “inquisitors must envy”.

                                ...The thoughtful child
awakes one Christmas morning to insist
there is no Santa Claus. Her parents smile
to watch her open each amazing gift.

Leah Fritz warned us at the beginning of the book. There must be still flowers, deep woods and heights that Turner and Wordsworth admired, but she never writes about them. Equanimity? She seeks it in “new greenery exploding from old granite” after the highways will be silenced and the planet poisoned. In that recovering world she could be “a fly upon the wall/ where an appropriate blue plaque has been installed”.