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

     ‘Two Nations’ is a concept often applied to Britain in social and economic terms, It is equally apposite to the current poetry scene. Some writers northern by birth and temperament have crossed the divide, but many talents remain immured behind the barriers erected by ignorance and prejudice, denied an audience south of the divide through their exclusion from national publishers which are almost entirely concentrated in the south (Carcanet and Bloodaxe are glorious exceptions).

     That is one reason why Stanley Cook has never had his due. Another is the author’s reticence, manifested both in his laconic style of writing and his abhorrence of cliquishness and self-publicising.

     It must be added that unlike most poets Cook does not proceed from the poetic to the profound. By this I mean surface attitudinising which leads to a more refined embodiment of insights. Instead, his starting-point is the prosaic, a series of carefully phrased statements, and his goal is the transformation of these into the memorable by the power of poetic inspiration. And it has to be admitted that in many instances this necessary alchemy has not occurred. Nor does it appear from his work that Cook is at all clear when and where a transmutation of baser metal has occurred. Thus we have two sequences about teaching, Form Photograph and Staff Photograph each containing thirty snapshots of people which are notable for their brevity, the precision of observation, and the careful control of language, but which neither individually nor as a whole manage to perform what in the abstract their prospectus promises. Yet it is not the subject-matter that is inhibiting, for there is at least one of Cook’s poems on this theme - ‘A Proper Comic’ - which we must count among his successes.

     No, we have a poet whose unpretentiousness and distrust of aggrandized emotion lead him to underestimate the role of imaginative and linguistic daring. This is all the more surprising because of the Interest he has shown in experiment, particularly in the realm of concrete poetry. When dealing with characteristic subject-matter Cook’s blank verse easily becomes monotonous, like so many yards of plain cloth rather arbitrarily sliced from the roll. Too rare are the occasions when sharpness of perception and verbal elan lead to such felicities as

a landscape clean as After in advertisements

or

Mind knocks at my body and finds me in

or

A slate falls from their roof but turns into
a pigeon and puts itself back in place.

     These lead us to mourn the McCaig that might have been.

     But Cook is of course his own man, and in so many ways his instincts are refreshingly sound. Consider the closeness to experience that he practises - a life is reflected in his verse, and not just that of an individual but of a whole provincial existence. The virtues of Cook’s subject matter cannot be too often insisted upon: his first full-length book is called Signs of Life, a life lived by millions in northern cities and towns, the buildings, the streets, the industries, the countryside which everywhere encroaches. Indeed Cook may well be regarded as the foremost chronicler of northern urban man amongst our contemporaries. Tony Connor has a surer touch in his earlier work, but his powers have almost entirely deserted him since his self-transplantation to the States.

     Where would you go for an instinctive appreciation of the social mores of this part of Britain in the mid- to late-twentieth century? Why, poems such as ‘Sheffield’, ‘Page Hall’, ‘Woodside’, ‘Canal’ and ‘West Riding’ amongst others in Signs of Life, an indispensable collection, and out of print!

     And where would you go for an unflinching confrontation with individuals, their generosities, their pomposities, their cruelties, their eccentricities in this same environment? Why, poems such as ‘Mr ‘Elvidge’, ‘Mr Salt’, ‘Betty’, ‘The Landlord’ from the same book, and ‘Couple in a Semi’ from the pamphlet Woods  beyond  a Cornfield (Rivelin Press), reprinted in Selected Poems.

     Cook’s poem ‘Rembrandt’ is an articulation of his primary concern in writing:

My poems should be as sure, not flattering
For her whiteness any woman,
Nor favouring the mill child clattering
To early death, his thin legs swollen
Into clogs; but all things human
I should expose. No face has stolen
Importance from the clothes beneath
In work of his; but, as was true,
People painted had the hands,
The hair and eyes to sorrow in,
The legs and faces for rejoicing,
Yet he forbade his heart to grieve
About some haycock huge old man,
Alone in the amber afternoon,
Or to be pleased with children playing
Whose knee backs dimpled as they ran.

His theorising of the same point reads as follows:

‘It is simply a case of stating accurately what you have observed. Of course you have observed inaccurately and the accurate recording of the distinctive inaccuracies of which you are unaware is the theme of your poems.’

     Perhaps it is because the accuracy/inaccuracy conflict seems to be working at low pressure in them that the two school sequences seem rather dull. Cook’s other most ambitious piece ‘Woods Beyond a Cornfield’ is quite another matter. This is his longest poem and his most substantial achievement. The issues are complex: the landscape being described embodies the polarities of peace and violence. The cornfield is idyllic-pastoral; the wood has been witness to a gruesome murder. The poem moves constantly between opposites attempting reconciliation. It moves between memories of the past and knowledge of present realities. The poem is a meditation, and attempts to define the social and intellectual backgrounds of the actors in the dream; yet subjectivity keeps breaking in as the poet at one moment rails against inequality and the next makes an impassioned plea for understanding. All the themes and moods are confidently woven in, and the writing is never less than distinguished, as the following quotation demonstrates:

As I write, the red machines
Descend from the narrow road to the fields,
Monsters with a bird-like brain
At the funnelled end of the chute for the grain.
They roll up lengths of the carpet of corn
And lay behind them the unbaled straw.
No reaper and binder whirling its arms
Like a land-born paddle steamer
No sheaves to stook and lead to barns,
No threshing time - all left behind
Like the sickle and the scythe;
No crowds of helpers and spectators -
Only the solitary driver;
No obvious end to the superfield
Where over long stubble moves a weasel
With the flowing easy line
Of a flourish of copperplate writing.
Where will he and the others who used to use
The hedges to live in be rehoused?
That wildness that runs or runs in the blood
Has nowhere now to go but the wood.

     This passage has an almost mythical power, as we realise that not only is technological change in the countryside being described but the climactic couplet is also inclusive of the murder, and a hypothesis that could even be taken as an explanation for that murder.

     ‘Woods beyond a Cornfield’ whilst never obscure is Cook at his most subtle. Usually he is at pains to write with simplicity. He has gone on record with the statement: ‘As far as the style is concerned, I hope the steel worker and his wife next door would never need a dictionary to read my poems.’ In most of Cook’s work ‘the steelworker and his wife next door’ would .have no difficulty either in identifying with the ‘signs of life’ in the following cameos:

In factory and school canteen the plastic cups
Still smelling of yesterday’s meat and gravy
Pass the first cold of the season round.
                                                   (‘Autumn’)

Works chimneys remain by which they lived to
     die
Their muzzles still smoking from killing the
     summer sky.
                                                   (‘Sheffield’)

Three old ladies are serious on a seat
Hung round like Christmas trees with a lifetime’s
     trinkets;
A young woman with her baby asleep
Crosses easily her rich completed legs.
                                                   (‘The Cholera Monument’)

Floodlit now, its niches glow in the evening
With the golden lustre of a china ornament.
                                                   (‘Town Hall’)

            They stand on a doorstep of class
Ignoring the curiosity of passer-by
And waiting and waiting to be asked inside.
                                                   (‘Couple in a Semi’)

     These extracts display all his virtues: an accuracy of detail, an unflinching honesty of response, and a refusal to inflate an experience or the language which embodies it; empathy and social conscience go hand-in-hand through these admirable texts. His attempts to tease out differences, to accurately record whilst not crowding out any ‘distinctive inaccuracies’ that may occur sometimes attain a rare translucence. At such moments, as he of the girl in ‘Woodside’, we may say of Cook:

Nothing irrelevant is tolerated here
And all her joys and sorrows are perfectly clear