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

Our policy of including sequences of poems, or generous selections from poetry sequences has certainly found favour with our contributors. In this Issue, we bring you a very varied selection in subject matter and form, opening with a selection from Matt Simpson's three-month poetry residency in Tasmania. These poems 'engage in conversations with a 19th century writer and artist, Louisa Anne Meredith, who left Birmingham for Australia in 1839.' Martyn Halsall uses a sequence of haiku to construct a long poem. Pat Winslow's elegant 'scrape at testicular remains' brings the Ice Man absorbingly to life from his hunting days, through 5,300 years in the ice to a full-size picture curtesy of a technology he could not have imagined. 'Iceman.gif' - Click here. Returning to formal construction, Estill Pollock's Indian Summer tells its story through a quartet of sonnets.

Groups of individual poems come from Abi Hughes-Edwards (Step-grandma Bates, cold in the sun / was nearly there, half stone half whiskers, / lips trombone-cold waiting to be kissed); Frances Nagle includes the haunting, Home; John Latham, a scientist as well as a poet, experiments in a most individual way. (Flower, won first prize in the 1997 Manchester Poets Open Poetry Competition); and Gaia Holmes, 'I write about what I know & feel & see & smell. My poems are images built on the bones of emotion...' We are pleased to introduce a generous selection of Gaia's poetry; we believe they show exciting promise.

As promised, we include in this issue work from the remaining two editors, Angela Topping and Steven Waling. Although some have chosen to misunderstand our motive in including our own work, we think it is only fair that as editors we should each 'show our hand' early on. Contributor's might like to know to whom they are entrusting their poems. We would also like to make the point that we do not operate an 'exclusions' clause. Brando's Hat is for everyone, our only criterion is that we like the work enough to want to publish it, subjective as that may be.