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

“Free as the swallows poets are/ But, far as their needs propel them,/ To a single place must home” and indeed how rooted these poems are in the natural world of his home in Suffolk and in the spacious archives of observations and reflection of this phase of his life. It’s the topophilia that emerges from slowness and attentiveness to the natural world and the lasting companionship it guarantees. The wealth of these poems make it hard to choose an illustration.

Whiter than hoarfrost, look, one jonquil shines
As ever here despite the winter gales,
From flowerheads paired exhales
A breath so faint, it too is seasonless,
The time, the place, our persons and the sense
Merged in suspense
Beyond all consequences, radiant white of
absence, emptiness.

     Again in ‘Multiple Vistas’, the long poem composing part 11, with its extended arguments you still sense this pull of nature at eye-level. Part 111 is the extended farewell to life, the sift and slip of life and its busyness out there; and here the archives of sentiment and review are regretful but measured by the lasting life of season and light. The poems of Part 1V delight in historical reference and the wit that depends on it. It’s a mandarin voice more distant, more obscure and harder to warm to. Here he can reject unequivocally this age he and we know is apocalyptic and its cheap and dismal manifestations (though he offers a hint of an apology for being an old scold in ‘Life and Art XX11’). In this section are two lovely renditions of Leopardi. The last poems are startling allegories of the slippage of near death imagined by a poet who remains at full power.