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

Matthew Sweeney’s seventh collection is the work of a mature writer with a distinctive voice. Sweeney tells a good tale. You can imagine nearly everything here going well at a reading, with wry introductions from the kind of poet you’d like to have a drink with afterwards. He’s at his best on the edges of meaning and myth. In ‘The Lake’, each phrase is precisely weighed. Every detail is rich and resonant, yet, at the end, you don’t quite understand how its subject’s “eyes turned blind, turned to stone”, leaving a satisfying mystery.

     Most of the poems here have a lighter touch. When ‘The Volcano’ erupted, the poet packed “your sari, my Armani suit, grabbed the monkey and ran”. The poem ends with him imagining the lava:

entering our house
and swarming over the chairs,
turning them into sculptures
that one day we’d come back and see.

     Sweeney has this ability to take the incidental, showing its humour and quirkiness, then turn it into something more resonant. But it doesn’t come off all the time. A third of the way in, this collection sags (in the one where Sweeney tells us how jealous he is that his daughter goes drinking with Ray Davies, of the Kinks). There are six poems ‘beginning with a line from’ (Shelley, Keats etc) some of which feel like exercises. There are several haiku and, for every gem, like the title poem, or a recipe for roadkill, there are two other pieces which makes you think of a professional poet on his travels, writing out of habit rather than inspiration.

     The collection should finish with Sweeney’s powerful reworking of the old Irish poem, ‘Sweeney’. However he follows this with ‘The Thorpeness Poems’, a so-so sequence whose most memorable piece is a sarcastic shot at an amateur poet convinced that he’s destined to be

the Shakespeare of the new millennium
and although he hasn’t published yet
he’s read to poets, and they’ve gasped,
gasped, and couldn’t find words.

Fun, but an easy target. 

     Wide-eyed, Sweeney concludes the sequence, and the book, with the line: “It’s like I’m living in a gallery!” The exhibition he’s put on here is uneven, but always an interesting place to visit.