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

In conversation, the phrase "let's face it" suggests that one participant is signalling to his counterpart that the pleasantries are at an end, that only the glibbest matter of fact conclusion is forthcoming. As the first line in a poetry collection - in Nigel Pickard's opening piece, 'Camera Obscura' - it had me a little worried. Was this going to be a less than nourishing volley from the hipster school of contemporary poetry? Fortunately, a little further down the opening page, there is a neat encapsulation of the virtues that are to be found in Making Sense: “For/a short while,/we were no/longer a part/of that/street-level world…” Pickard is attuned to the street-level; happily, his frequent forays to the side of it never come with a big sign painted Here comes the sublime. An exception is ‘Lily, Swimming’ which is here in full and would be even better without the first two lines:

There’s something spectral
about her,

part of this watery
other world.

A ghost of herself,
she glides from

one side to the next,
the light on

the surface like a net
she slips through

Some are annoyed by poems about, or featuring children. I once heard a poet and ex Poetry Review editor mutter that he hated “poems about playing frisbee with a three year old”. Pickard has several very good poems in this category and the knowledge that he is the father of an autistic child, both deepens and leaves them unchanged for this reader. From ‘Bleach’:

             And when
we got up there
and found him
trying to rub
himself clear,
we rinsed his head
like a furious
baptism,
in which, briefly,
he even answered
to his name.

Pickard also gives his son a ravishing walk-on part in the outstanding
‘Autumnal’, a poem giving beautifully lilting and listing attention to the
resting places of unharvested pears:

some skimming the swing
beneath, the swing

our son spends
days on, away

from everyone — that
parabolic lack

of complication

The prevalence of couplets and short lines serve Pickard well. I like the white space, the well spaced steps taking you down the page. (I think Robert Crawford calls them horizontal margins). When really achieved as in ‘Blake cuts himself shaving’ the poem becomes an inviolate site of structured wit:

He was thinking
of something else,
foam and water

chaotic
in the basin,
and the blood came up

like poppies
in a Monet.
The blood came up

like a private
work of art.
The blood came up
and he held
his razor
like a brush.

My initial fear that “cool” might intrude was completely gone by the
time I’d read the last poem — ‘Being a man’. Pickard writes of the tragedy of infant death in lines flavoured with the exact opposite:

afterwards, in
the pub, you are
there again,
still upright,
holding
your wife, saying
you know where
they are, that’s the
thing, that’s
the main thing;
somehow certain,
still somehow
making sense.

Other poems dealing humorously with such subjects as the crowd40
control aspects of teaching, and the attempt to tell a politically correct joke, have a less taut, less essential feel. I wondered if these amiable pieces were those that hovered over the selection border — at 35 pages this book has the feel of being somewhere between pamphlet and full collection. There is a tighter more coherent pamphlet within this book, but this is a minor quibble, because there is clearly a fine and larger collection waiting to get out as well.