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

John Heath-Stubbs, who was born in 1918, is the last of what might be described as the romantic-classical or classical-romantic poets who, in the forties, firmly dissociated themselves from the ephemeral Apocalypse group which included the now almost forgotten names of Dorian Cooke, Henry Treece, Nicholas Moore and J.F. Hendry. Heath-Stubbs was rather more closely akin to George Barker, David Wright and his own young protegé and friend, Sidney Keyes but he is, and always has been, a distinctively individual writer, well-known for his prosodic versatility and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and learning. These qualities are still much in evidence in his latest collection, Galileo’s Salad.

     This is, on the whole, a relaxed volume, containing a few slight but charming occasional poems and some verses for younger readers which fulfil the implied desideratum in Auden’s shrewd comment (on de la Mare) that there are no good poems which are only for children. Even in the decidedly adult poems such as ‘Redloam, My Ex’ in which Lileth (according to the Talmud, Eve’s predecessor as Adam’s wife) speaks of Eve as ‘An apple-chomping amateur gardener’ Heath-Stubb’s style is easy to the point of jauntiness and the poem sparkles with wit and is spiced with irony.

     There are a few peffunctory pieces in the book: ‘Naming of Rivers’, while showing this poet’s now legendary wide reading, is really very prosy and ‘Homage to Marianne Moore’ is feeble as well as tactlessly self-regarding:

‘Imaginary gardens with real toads in them’ -
Your prescription for a poem;
But in my case, perhaps,
Three wise frogs
Who see no evil, hear no evil, croak no evil.

     On the whole, though, this is an enjoyable collection and some of the weightier poems such as the magnificent ‘At The Ninth Hour’ are as fine as anything Heath-Stubbs had ever written.