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

THE GETTING OF VELLUM by Catherine Byron,
59pp, £6.99, Blackwater Press, PO Box 5115, Leicester LE2 8ZD
TIGERS ON THE SILK ROAD by Catherine Gallagher,
68pp, £6.95, Arc, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden OL14 6DA
SECRET VILLAGES by Rennie Parker,
48pp, £6.00, Flambard, East Fourstones, Hexham NE47 5DX

How much poetry would we have without subsidy? Here are three books whose publishers are gratefully acknowledging four lots of financial assistance from funding bodies. Even with two grants, Blackwater Press have not served their author well: the cover of Catherine Byron’s collection parted company with the pages on their first reading. And that’s a pity, because there’s something compelling about a book with a cover where calligraphy’s set against skin, with a hint of what’s to come just decipherable: ‘When I bought the cleaver / at the butcher’s suppliers . . .’

‘You urge me to use my blunt nails on your skin.’ The first line of the first poem hooks you. Straight in. Poems that feel raw – not raw in the sense of unfinished, far from it, these are elegant and sometimes spare poems – but raw in the sense of exposed, straight into open, visceral experience. ‘Visceral’ – the word must have come from the central section of the book and its eponymous long poem ‘The Getting of Vellum’. Lindisfarne and Cuthbert inspire many, but this writer takes

so many calves, on this tiny isle’s
scant pasture, and wild sand dunes
and reedy shores

as her focus. Her collaborations with a calligrapher pack the poem with arcane knowledge of the process of vellum-making:

skinning a calf
a three days dead calf . . .
It’s like watching a birth,
not a flaying,
seeing the calf being born
a second time,
the headfirst slow emergence
from its skin . . .

In places (this poem, and others like ‘Minding You’), there is too much information: it slurs the language towards prose:

in the last years of the twentieth century
Master calligrapher Denis Brown
is choosing skins from the fresh stock
of Joe Katz, Czech vellum maker extraordinaire

Perhaps this is why ‘Coco de Mer’ made it into the Forward Book of Poetry 2002 rather than the central, long poem?

Katherine Gallagher also wants, though not often, to tell us too much. A phrase like ‘the doctor’s notes carelessly / left on her bed’ jars in the otherwise restrained long poem about cancer, ‘Poinsettas’, which is the final section of Tigers on the Silk Road. But the ‘I knew you’d be impatient to hear / what was in flower’ of ‘Arriving’ skilfully condenses so much about her mother and herself, their relationship and her mother in hospital. This is a varied and colourful collection: family, a closeness to the land in Australia, wars, ozones and plants, lots of plants – even the children are ‘like potplants packed tight’ in ‘Going to Mass in the ’39 Pontiac’.

One of Rennie Parker’s poems from Secret Villages is also in the Forward collection. The flat, steepled and dyked landscape of Lincolnshire holds many of the poems where, as in ‘Acton Burnell’ – though this example is from Shropshire:

History is silent, the one door
the dead can enter. They slide below
the smooth green cover, grateful at last,
cold buds split and passions make no haste.

‘Dark pastorals’: for once a jacket blurb seems to have it right, though many of these poems seem to keep their secrets, leaving me unsure of where they’ve taken me.