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

pebbles, debris by Jim Dening.
Arcade publishers, 7, Ashley House, The
Broadway, Farnham Common, Slough SL2 3PQ. 65pp; £7.00.

North by South, New and Selected Poems by John Davies.
Seren, 38-40 Nolton Street, Bridgend, CF1 3BN. 151pp; £8.95

Collected Poems by Freda Downie, edited by George Szirtes.
Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland NE48 1RP. 176pp.; £8.95.

Jim Dening’s pebbles, debris is an attractively produced little volume, its title satisfying one conception of what poetry is in our times – how many poets fit poetry into their lives. Dening’s voice is consistent, even (as are the other voices in this review) and comes into play upon subjects which are (characteristically in much 20th - 21st century poetry) the concern of the ‘domestic’ eye and mind. Arcade publishers claim that “These are poems for a life revisited: poems on family, loss, love, landscape, rivers, humorous poems, ironic asides.” Often the voice and view of the poetry falls through the filter of ageing. The sense of elegy is moving (but not claustrophobic), as in ‘The old path remade’ or ‘Chiltern diary’ and the sense of time passing in ‘After 24 years at Little Hertfordshire House: preparing to leave,’ two stanzas of prose poetry. Continuity, repetitions in the ageing process are beautifully evoked in ‘It creeps up on you’ where the present father persona unconsciously imitates the lost father with the pebble and the “useless things” in his coat. But Dening is not all serious and solemn. ‘Poetry feels like’ contains the gruff, agitated persistent voice, moving in poetry, watching other poetry appear:

Poetry is not delicate sentiments
nervously expressed and avoiding offence,
poetry feels like what is going on here,
impatient feelings and the search for words,
incomprehension of things, the transient attention,
the arguments and the competitive people
who can do better.

Dening also manages to be wry, amusing, punning on etymologies in ‘Washing radish’ or in a subtle reaction to the Blair election ‘South Bucks, May 1997’ leaves the reader wondering whether he is being doubly ironic, considering the present war. His response to contemporary life is acute as in ‘Trick a new person’ – a long list of sales slogans, hints for living, and anxieties that accumulate and bombard the self in the commercial world.

   John Davies’ North by South contains material from At the Edge of Town (1981), The Silence in the Park (1982), The Visitor’s Book (1985), Flight Patterns (1991), Dirt Roads (1997), and a section of ‘New Poems’. “From the slate quarries of north Wales to the steelworks of his youth in south Wales to the dirt roads of the American West, the poet’s travels through rough landscapes and his meetings with the characters who inhabit them inspire witty, occasionally satirical and often piercing meditations” – so says the blurb and accurately. Davies’ voice too is assured, confident in its tones and its focus. I first met his work anthologised in Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480-1980 (Poetry Wales Press, 1984) and was struck particularly by the poem, included here, ‘How to Write Anglo-Welsh Poetry’ (stanzas 5 & 9) - funny, poignant and angry:

Spray place-names around. Caernarfon.
Cwmtwrch. Have, perhaps, a Swansea
sun marooned in Glamorgan’s troubled
skies; even the weather’s Welsh, see…

That’s it, you’ve finished for now.
Just brush the poems down: dead, fluffed
things but your own almost. Get
them mounted in magazines. Or stuffed.

The words “ghost” and “shadows” appear frequently in these pages – the connection is made strongly between the poet’s review of an indigenous Welsh homeland and the ghostly presences of the Indian tribes in America. ‘The Visitor’s Books’ and ‘In Port Talbot’ are moving and accurately drawn assessments of the poet’s relationship to his roots:

And when at last shared work’s vibrations cease,
sharing itself will fade (as in mining villages nearby)
with Keir Hardie’s dream, with Bethanias long since ghosts,
down history’s shaft. Difference and indifference will untie
taut bonds of work that cramp yet forged here a community;
then old South Wales will have to start a New. Meanwhile
reverberations still, slow leavings, long goodbye.

The sequence ‘The White Buffalo’ examines the American past evolving into the present, raking up all the agonies of a rapid and deadly evolution and invasion.

Everywhere cash registers
its joy, and in art galleries

yards of noble redskin hang.

Reading the volume you get a strong sense of Davies’ control over his poems’ formal aspects. So much poetry sent for review consists of bursts of free verse effusion, telling of trite little domestic epiphanies tailored unsurprisingly to thirty-forty line little magazine page capacities. But Davies’ subject matter is wide-ranging and he can turn on the form at will (see the pentameter couplets of ‘Burying the Waste’). He remains too gruff, satirical or tender (see ‘For a small Daughter’) to be dull, and includes a demonstration of masterly sonneteering in ‘Reading the Country’. He is a master craftsman and worthy of several readings.

   Freda Downie’s Collected Poems as George Szirtes says, “aims to provide a rounded picture, not a comprehensive one. It also wants to make certain claims for her. It wishes to suggest that she was a far more important poet than people thought … that she was an extraordinarily ‘real’ poet, to use her own term of approbation, one whose work has a clarity available to only a few writers … her poems belong, if one has to ‘place’ them anywhere, with the Dickinson heritage of power through limit.” Downie, who died on the fifth of May 1993, wrote with an astonishingly even voice throughout this collection, like a current being turned on – clear and precise. The collection epitomises one strand of modern poetry (represented by all these volumes) of the voice taking snapshots of experience – to horridly mix metaphors. No fading Modernist epyllion here, nor post-modernist crossword puzzles for the almost fashionably wired, but poems that come powerfully into play, glance around or stare, speak and fall silent:

Poetry is a loose term and only
A fool would offer a definition.
Those not concerned with the form
At all usually refer to some
Beautiful manifestation or the other.
                                                (‘Some Poetry’)

Material in this volume includes poems from A Stranger Here (1977), Plainsong (1981), Forty Poems (1989) and Uncollected Poems. The musing voice is compelling, as in ‘The Bay’ and ‘The Emperor Chi’en-lung on Horseback’, moving from the ever- emergent ‘I’ focus (see ‘Mountain Road’) to an almost anonymous persona set in time, as here in ‘The Watercolourist’:

Not the conflagration of distant cities,
But merely the question of the sun
Going, or coming perhaps, beyond trees.
And the trees, always the extent of trees
With their total sum of leaves
And footpaths halting at formal waters.

This sense of being within time – a vital mark of the kind of poets represented here – is beautifully evoked in ‘Open to the Public’ (st. 3):

But those instruments, out of tune with time,
Letters unfolded, poems blinded by glass,
Nether garments displayed – and punctual intruders,
Unfamiliar and unloved, haunting every room.

But the reader can have rather too much of voices talking domesticity, memory and desire – it can seem like watered down Romanticism. Mostly, I think Downie takes the focus beyond the mundane in a kind of instant outreaching of voice as here:

Herculean, all sex and violence,
The white giant still keeps the hill.
Recumbent in the grass – running
Sideways too, like a dreaming animal,
Advancing full frontal nudity
And making a really firm stand
With a wave of his airy club,
He fixes everything with four eyes.

Never sleeps or descends light;
Descends only in darkness
To flat foot it abroad
Without fee, fi, fo or fum,
Staring dumbly through low windows,
Moony faced, begging maintenance
From white-fingered dreamers.
                                                (‘Cerne Abbas’)

Downie at times draws in literary references gently and successfully, though her poems never bristle unpleasantly with the literary – as in the Coleridgean ‘The Indifferent Horseman’ and what she called the Hardyesque ‘A Formal Goodnight’. ‘Swincombe’ shows a fine controlling hand in a small poem, so too does ‘Regret’. The voice remains intelligent cultured and witty throughout.

   These volumes, then, represent in their own styles the fragments, the “pebbles, debris” of one kind of poetry which is familiar but not always safe, well-tried, but not yet redundant.