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

Not yet having got around to tracking down a full collection of Nimmo’s work, I was pleased to have this opportunity to read not only a selection of her previous books but also some new poems. I can’t think of anyone else in the UK that writes quite like her. In some ways, Nimmo writes like one of the modern Eastern European poets; as though it were necessary to disguise her meaning to go uncensored. She uses allegories and well-worn idioms that have a surprising tendency to give way underneath you just as you become aware that they are not the casual bits of language they appear to be, like trapdoors into the dark. In ‘Katherine’, (from The Underhill Experience) for example, the hackneyed metaphor in the idiom, “killing time”, is graphically infused with life: “I kill the hours one after the other. This one./ Wring its neck. Eyes glaze. Last spasm of little legs”.

     Her issues are personal but often achieve universal application. Within her poems about domestic abuse, for example, there are questions of human rights and the nature of evil. Depression pervades, but is approached from a stoical and sometimes grimly humorous angle, reminiscent of Szymborska (from ‘March 15th’):

At supper I do not choke on a fishbone.
My banana-skin does not fall to the floor.
I do not slip on it. I do not break my hip.

I am not so unwise as to take the electric fire
into the bathroom and balance it
on the edge of the bath.

     This selection, with the new poems in the first part of the book, gives an impression that Nimmo has grown in confidence over the last thirteen years. The same material and themes come up but are given a more direct treatment. One other development in certain poems though seems to be a paring of her already bare language down to its bones. I think you might need to be Beckett to get away with this. I feel the results are perhaps a little too private and obscure. But the sense of passivity in the earlier poems has undergone a change, and there is a new witty, biting back (from ‘ill-wishing Him’):

I wish he’d gone senile and forgotten
who he was and what he’d done
and everyday I could remind him. I wish
he’d died and left my name
as next of kin. They’d ring me
and I’d say, Never heard of him.

     And in her 1998 collection, The Children’s Game, which Peter Porter described as “numinous”, there is a set of cinquaines written in memory of a baby, where the pared down quality of her language and her direct approach work beautifully and with grace: it starts -

Nine weeks:

October to
nearly Christmas. Beloved.
all the days he knew were short
and cold

     and ends -

Morning
sunshine. Spring light
is sharp, leaves acid green,
the long-shadowed grass stays wet all
morning.