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

The Mermaid Room by Charles Bennett (Crocus, £3.50)
Waiting Room by Stephen Wade (Bosun, £2.00)
The Fordwych House Extract by Brenda Williams (Sixties Press, £3.00)
Windsong by Barry Tebb (Sixties Press, £3.00)
The Blue Box by Robert Etty (Shoestring, £4.00)
Newborough County by Rennie Parker (Shoestring, £4.00)
Cowboy Hat by Peter Knaggs (Halfacrown £7.00)

All of these titles have something to recommend them - but nothing in Charles Bennett's output to date prepares us for this. Having built up a considerable reputation in magazines and publishing two previous pamphlets, Bennett always seemed to be on the verge of achieving
something really remarkable. And The Mermaid Room marks this breakthrough. Here are poems written in a distinctive, assured voice full of mystery and speculation. Yeats said somewhere that an individual style is developed through constant imitation of great masters. Bennett's master has been Seamus Heaney and some of the Irish poet's virtues - precision, an excellent ear, and an acute sense of history and place - have set him in good stead. But there is something at work here which is unique: a sensibility at odds with the variety of experience, making sense of it through language as and where it can. A powerful collection with promise of more to come.

Stephen Wade's poems are firmly rooted in time and place and I've always found him particularly striking when writing about family relationships and the connections which exist between individual and community, individual and place. The highlight of this collection is ‘Crossing the Humber’ which seems to me to characterise all that's best in Wade's work: a firm control of language, an ear for colloquialisms, and an idiosyncratic sense of humour. The voice of dissent comes through strongly in Brenda Williams' pamphlet. I hadn't come across her work before but was immediately struck by its originality, its tenacity, and its willingness to explore areas which seem to be (unfortunately) outside the range of what is deemed as 'suitable' for contemporary poetry. From the same press, Barry Tebb's Windsong marks something of a return to form for a poet who made a reputation for himself in the sixties, particularly through his inclusion in the Penguin anthology, Children of Albion. Tebb's poetry plays on tensions implicit in the public and the private, the spoken and unspoken, the formal and the free. He is obviously an accomplished poet with a great deal to say.

Any poet who can rhyme Mum with phlegm and air with vinegar and make it seem not only natural but somehow inevitable gets my vote. And that's exactly what Robert Etty does in this beautifully produced pamphlet, the first of two received from the excellent Shoestring Press. Etty is that rare thing: a formal poet who uses form to reinforce the content of his poems. At the heart of this careful, well-ordered collection are a couple of immaculately crafted sonnets, the best of which, ‘Cleethorpes Rock’ describes a childhood trip to the seaside and ends in Etty's characteristic voice:

I've taken forty years to understand
the way he held her left in his right hand.

And in the final poem of the collection. ‘Dovendale’ I think I can just detect the influence of, Edward Thomas. Rennie Parker is another poet I came across for the first time through this review, although she has already published a collection with Flambard. Parker is a real find. She brings a highly observant eye, an awareness of social distinctions, and a wry sense of humour to all the poems in this collection. I wasn't surprised to discover that she's published on the Georgian poets as many of their virtues - including a refusal to make more of something than the thing itself warrants - are present in her work. These are poems you want to go back to.

I know for a fact that Cowboy Hat is Peter Knaggs' first collection and, as such, provides the reader with an excellent introduction to this entertaining, anecdotal poet. The main virtue of Knaggs' work is its accessibility, although I feel very strongly that he still needs to move from under the shadow of Simon Armitage whose mannerisms stalk through half the poems. When he allows his own - very distinctive voice - to slice through, Knaggs comes across as a poet with more than a passing interest in narrative, monologue, and that uncanny atmosphere of displacement which can so often be detected just under the surface of domestic life. Here is a poet at the beginning of his career, full of promise and ideas, still somewhat wide-eyed at the prospect of what poetry can do, and with the potential to move in any of several directions. With Cowboy Hat we have the emergence of a bright new talent. And that seems as good a place as any to end.