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

Grevel Lindop steps carefully in his poetry, taking his time to develop themes and never overstating his case. A poem dealing with what can be seen of the surrounding countryside from within a city opens up slowly and without any startling images or striking phrases:

Sometimes from the top deck of a bus
or the apogee of the Big Wheel at a fairground
you suddenly see them, like a pencil-smudge
or a brush-stroke of blue ink over the stacked
concrete blocks of the Hulme estate and the
                                                        meat-pink
brick of the cavernous textile-mills at Reddish,
and say, ‘the hills!’ as if they were paying a rare
suspicious visit.

     It’s interesting that Lindop writes in this way because some people would say that if a poem doesn’t do something significant in its opening lines it’s unlikely to inspire you to read on. But his combination of easy rhythm and the relaxed voice makes it’s own mark and draws the reader into the warmth in the observation or memory.

     I suppose it could be said as a kind of criticism, that Lindop’s poems are comfortable, perhaps stemming from a comfortable life. They rarely, if ever, touch on wider social and political issues, though it isn’t necessary for poems to do that. The Hulme estate appears simply as part of a picture and not as a social blot on the landscape, and in any case it needed demolishing and not poems written about it. So, I don’t think Lindop has anything to apologise for. And his poems don’t investigate personal matters or at least not in a way that invites readers into the poet’s life. There is little here that is confessional. Some charming domestic poems, and a touching note about a child suffering from asthma, do give glimpses into the personal but the emotion is muted. This is, perhaps, no bad thing in a world where laying oneself open to the public view is often seen as virtue.

     I enjoyed this book. As a Selected Poems it ranges over thirty or so years and includes a sequence written around wood-engraving by Thomas Bewick. I admired these poems and many others in the collection but what really attracted me were the short and relatively simple poems which focused on the momentary:

For the first time she can walk
Under October trees
And feel the leaves with a soft strange shock
Crowd like a wave to her knees.

Reaching the end of the drift
She stands and considers, then
Turns back with an urge of sudden delight
To trudge through it again,

And this rare afternoon
In the brittle gold sun
Invents for herself what all children
Always have done.