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

Todd Swift salutes small-scale productions

James Bell
The Just Vanished Place
tall-lighthouse £5

William Fuller
Three Replies
Barque Press £4

Miriam Gamble
This Man’s Town
tall-lighthouse £4

Yvonne Green
Boukhara
Smith/Doorstop Books £4

Richard Lambert
The Magnolia
The Rialto £5.50

John Mccullough
Cloudfish
Pighog £6

Mary Michaels
Caret Mark
Hearing Eye £3

Elspeth Smith
Wishbone
Smith/Doorstop Books £4

David Wheatley
Lament for Ali Farka Touré
Rack Press £4

Anthony Wilson
The Year of Drinking Water
Exeter Leukaemia Fund £5

After reading dozens of recent pamphlets from British and Irish poets, I can only say that the scope and range of emerging talent is inspiring. Pamphlet publishing – never entirely neglected – seems to be in full bloom now, allowing poets young and old, unheralded or laurelled, to reach readers. It’s good news.

   There were too many pamphlets worthy of notice for me to safely say that the ten I’ve managed to single out here are the ‘best’ – but each took me sufficiently by surprise to warrant a returning glance, then ongoing attention. James Bell, Scottishborn, Devon-based, embarks on a poetic project of formally open constraints in his tall-lighthouse pamphlet, The Just Vanished Place. The collection presents a sequence of ninety-nine numbered poems, each of nine lines. The presiding (heavy-drinking) spirits of the collection, Charles Bukowski and John Berryman, appear alongside a small cast of other characters, along with manmade structures and wildlife. (These include Lou Lou, who ‘loves la mer’, cormorants, and, especially, an unfinished bridge.) The tone veers from high to low, but the capacious poem can handle it. Sometimes the style is serio-comic hard-boiled:

the sad blonde in furry boots
has eaten her sandwich for lunch
and gone – it’s too damned cold
                                                                                    (‘86’)

   Bell offers no immediately graspable grand narrative; but there are leitmotifs: the grey weather, observations of the tidal harbour, the slow drip-feed of time, and the poet’s reluctance to enlist an incomplete local bridge as a Hart Crane-style metaphor. Bell manages to achieve something poignant, even exhilarating, in the process of composing these often selfreflexive, modestly emotive lyrics. The process is so appealing there’s almost an unspoken encouragement in the sequence, to write of one’s own ‘just vanished place’.

Strange (and visionary) language is what William Fuller’s Three Replies seems to be all about. From Barque Press this ‘late modernist’ collection opens with a puzzling dedication: ‘for the New Mystagogues’. The pamphlet is divided into three parts: ‘ Reply to Parson Platt’, ‘Reply to Traherne’ and ‘Reply to Experience’. The first poem might be a Digger speaking to his adversary, Parson Platt, and may intersect, obliquely, with Kevin Brownlow’s film, Winstanley. Religious struggle enters again in the second section, with the figure of Thomas Traherne. In the third section, the text’s already various levels of discourse, veering from defenestration to (hilariously) ‘the squid-jigging ground’, merge older quarrels with a contemporary feel. Fuller’s texts develop Traherne’s ‘An empty book is like an infant’s soul, in which anything may be written’. These are poems as collage, and they can generate various moods and moments of extravagant, or austere, pleasure. In part one, we’re informed that:

At the time of the uprising I was
taking a bath, in derogation
from plain language

   And then, in part two, the language becomes far more ornate, and abstract: ‘As someone perched in the house of peculiar treasure like a hawk or an eagle adrift / like a swan upon a pond, near bare trees’. Though this collection avoids closure like the plague, it ends with a sensuous invocation that allows for ways in to what is a formally, and thematically, ambitious work, combining elements from
various word-rich traditions of English experience:

seated, spatially ambiguous
and makes no claim
to seeing thinking
hand or hair
in low dim sky

Miriam Gamble won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and teaches Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her pamphlet, This Man’s Town, derives its title from a line by Louis MacNeice, grounding the poems here in his tradition of humane lyricism. Avant-garde poetry does not hold all the cards, or the key to the word-hoard, and ‘this town’ is also big enough for Gamble’s freewheeling linguistic bravado. Gamble’s poetry is inventive, but allusively aware of the great tradition. In the collection’s opening poem, ‘Anatomy of a Stetson’, she cleverly connects Eliot’s Stetson from The Waste Land, with those of the cowboy movies:

for there is no Stetson, there are only stetsons,
and no man’s head is ever almond-shaped.

   Perhaps the strongest poems are even closer to home: ‘Tinkering’ is dedicated to the memory of George Best (‘Something in the way you man that ball / is endemic to this city’) and ‘Cockling’ has Heaneyesque mouthfuls of organic diction (‘crapulent and secretive, / their thick shells burrowing like spies’). In ‘Arctic Fox’ Gamble writes of ‘gestures of extravagance that meet / mid-air in an arabesque of consummate economy’. Her smartly elegant poetry here achieves just that, and promises more.

Yvonne Green’s Boukhara is about home, and away too, but this time the away is not in the West but the East. Boukhara, according to the endnotes, ‘became an Emirate in 1784, and a Russian protectorate in 1868. Jews first came to the region in King Solomon’s reign to buy silk’. The word ‘protectorate’ is richly and darkly ironic here. Casting a shadow over the entire collection are the intimate wounds, as well as promises, of people, families, and whole cultures, compelled, either by love, or history, to house themselves closely together. At first, the poems seem on familiar poetic ground, exploring the poet’s ‘different history’ through the non-English words her family used for food. This exotic, sometimes sensuously charged poetry reaches its climax halfway through the collection in the delightful ‘Boukharian Boys’:

Gold skinned youths powered forward,
shoulder to shoulder, sternum raised
and danced holding each other’s backs

With ‘We Speak English Now’ the tone shifts, as the poet and her family realize they have ‘translated’ themselves. The last few poems, startlingly, confront spousal abuse in plain, sometimes painfully honest language. ‘The First Time’ is a history of intimate betrayal:

Came as a shock
his hard hand
swung against
my face
the backs of
my thighs
and deep
into my pride

If Yvonne Green’s poems partake of the tradition of the unheimlich by way of the Silk Road, Richard Lambert’s own sly lyric versions of the uncanny find their way home through strange rereadings of Edward Thomas. Exquisite unease scents these poems with Edwardian melancholy. Lambert’s The Magnolia is an evocative first collection. The title poem is elemental, as the first stanza shows:

Will you watch the wind blow
white blossom from the tree,
will you watch it blow

Lambert is not afraid of excessively poetic effects, embracing a style at once ironic and eloquent. In the clever Tintin homage ‘Thompson and Thomson’, he combines his interest in nature, with an evidently literary, almost Ashberyan, streak:

Will they come, those sombre gentlemen,
with black suits, and ties,
and soft looks to the corner of the garden
as if to avoid the issue or find a flower...

John McCullough’s work is often scientific in its precision and diction, leaping off from Poundian imagism onto stranger, more playfully contemporary ground. Cloudfish is witty, observational and a lot of fun to read. Poems are seeded with an overwhelming intent to yoke disparities together, as if aching to replay the best bits from the Martian School. The poem which opens the pamphlet, ‘Tropospheric’, lays out the book’s modernized Lucretian ars poetica:

Clouds know one word and always sing it.
Roughly translated it is change...

Time and again, McCullough finds a way to transform his empiricism into surrealism, as in ‘Spell’:

This is the hour everything
On the street squeezes into itself...

Mary Michaels’s Caret Mark, named after the proofreader’s mark that indicates something inadvertently omitted from a text, is an unusual assemblage of speech acts and social observation, troubling the borders between prose and poetry, between light verse and serious concerns. I’ve rarely read poems that occupy so much ground, with so many shocking gaps, while appearing so modest.

   Her poems, as in the striking ‘Manners’, are everywhere then nowhere at once. In its middle section, we move from a ‘a green bean hanging from the bamboo frame’ to:

the owner of the corner shop
a misnomer – it was in the middle of the Parade –
as he pushed up the shutters first thing in the morning
had been ushered back into his premises and stabbed

If, as poet-critic Nerys Williams suggests, there is a rich reward in writing poems through and across errors and absences, Michaels manages to locate a goldmine of evocative lapses and jump cuts.

Wishbone, by Elspeth Smith, is one of those perfect small collections, where every crafted poem seems placed exactly where the poet wanted it to go. Though she was born eighty years ago, in 1928 (in Ceylon, to British parents), this is the first work of hers I have been fortunate to read. It seems almost trite to compare her work to Emily Dickinson’s – but both poets use short lines, and strange swervings or abbreviations, to encompass human joy and pain. There are twenty-eight poems in Wishbone and almost all are eerie, memorable, chilling to the bone. The title poem captures the clipped simplicity, and smoothrunning complexity, of her style:

The feast is over.
I am stripped and shining
after the wildest night.

The last poem in this collection, ‘Outside’, quoted in full due to its relative brevity, speaks deeply to one tradition of lyric English melancholy:

Here is the gate,
waiting.
Here is the open door,
the windows
sparkling.
This is the house
I must never enter.
This is the bell
I must never ring.

David Wheatley’s pamphlet from Rack Press, Lament for Ali Farka Touré, is a rarity; only 150 copies were printed. I hope the poetic sequence finds a home in his next full collection. In the meantime, readers are encouraged to seek it out in this attractively produced limited edition. Wheatley has sought out exotic terrain in which to sing of music, and musicians. There is a hothouse air of the Muldoonian prank about this ingeniously sincere, yet ornately artificial, engagement with ‘nostalgia for world culture’. The style, like the subject matter, is a mélange of Frank Herbert’s Dune, Eliot’s poem ‘The Hippopotamus’ about St Augustine’s Church in Northern Africa and Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat.

   The poem opens, cheekily, lyrically, delightfully:

Hippo baby hippo
at the waterhole

where the crocodile’s
narrowed eyes stare

from the pool
o thirsty hippo

what will you do?

Ostensibly an elegy for a great African musician, the sequence is peppered with daunting non sequiturs that, in their curvature, lend a depth to the odd:

This belongs in no book.
If found in a book

consider it lost
and return to its keeper.

The poem is never lost for long. Markedly jaunty, it ends on the upbeat swing of:

A tune whose name
means happiness

and slapping the rump
of the first donkey he passes.

Anthony Wilson’s The Year of Drinking Water is an inspiring collection of poems occasioned by perhaps that least wanted of muses, cancer. Wilson, a published poet before the illness struck him, attempts to tell it like it is, stripping his poems bare of well-meaning self-help rhetoric. In the process, he discovers a blackly humoured alternative response that, if not fully therapeutic, is satisfyingly funny and truthful. The collection’s strongest poem ‘Tumour’ demonstrates how to welcome, or at least engage with, the terrible:

You gave me time to notice –
apple blossoms, hand movements,
the light taking leave of rooms.

It is a measure of Wilson’s approach that this poem ends with something other than a conventionally poetic resolution:

I would say I am grateful
but am not ready for that, just yet.

   Scattered across styles, traditions, regions, and nations, these poets won’t be easily packed into any one carry-all of critical design. Still, each of these collections richly engages with language, insofar as the poets themselves have decided to think, speak, and feel, through that medium, on their own terms.