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

So quiet and gentle is the music in Allnutt’s latest collection, a PBS choice for 2001, that if you’re in a hurry for the “gist” or the plot of this collection, you’ll probably miss it. And if you miss the music, you’ll miss the whole point. The stress patterns are complex and subtly side-step predictability while just leaving enough structure to create anticipation in the reader. Interruption of the syntax feels feminine in the way that rhymes can be; often there’s a playful sense of dilly-dally that diffuses energy, though not to the point of laxity; surrounding silence is allowed to penetrate. Even here, where the words are mainly monosyllabic and bi-syllabic, ie where you might expect a heavy or empathic effect, you are struck by the lightness and transparency of the language (from Village in County Durham 1998):

In summer when the factory floor was
strewn with dust -
it must have been asbestos - and the door stove
                                                                           in

again, the kids, their pockets and an old pram
loaded to the brim with apples, came

to lob for dear life
till the windows lay like lustres in the sun.

     The collection is in four main parts, the first and last of which involve the imagined experience of different women and girls in legend, history, myth and fantasy. The middle two sections , which I liked best, have poems that are based, I would guess, on direct personal experience. This opposition of imaginary and real, however, is something Allnutt questions in the last section of the book, in ‘Tabitha and Lintel: An Imaginary Tale’:

Lintel: ‘Who is it, then, that imagines me out
of my mountain lair and into the habit of
hovering, here, at the doorstone, mornings, in
the slant new sun, the cobwebs covering a
whole field like a shroud of butter muslin...’

Somehow, however, I felt this too self-conscious; attached rather than integral, and borne out of Allnutt’s awareness at some level that she may have failed to fully imagine and develop her personae. They all feel too much alike, and have the same gentle vocal characteristics of Allnutt. The refreshingly slow-paced, “come and find me” quality in the story-telling however, even in the less successful poems, is enough to make them worth attention.