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

Vernon Scannell, Behind the Lines, 2004, 64pp, £8.95
Shoestring Press, 19 Devonshire Avenue, Beeston, Nottingham NG9 1BS
John Lucas, The Long & the Short of it, 2004, 68pp, £8.95
Redbeck Press, 24 Frizinghall, Bradford BD9 4HH
Judy Gahagan, Night Calling, 2003, 80pp, £7.95
Enitharmon Press, 26B Caversham Road, London NW5 2DU
Myra Schneider, Multiplying the Moon, 2004, 120pp, £8.95
Enitharmon Press
Myra Schneider, Caroline Price, eds., Four Caves of the Heart, 2004, 120pp, £8.95
Second Light Publications, 9 Greendale Close, London SE22 8TG

The first two of these poets, both male, are adherents of the plain style. Scannell has been publishing for fifty years. His poems are celebrated for their ‘down‑to‑earthness’, informed by the democratic principle. A fine early example ‘Peerless Jim Driscoll’
ends:

   He looked just – I don’t just know – just ordinary
   And smaller, too, than what I thought he’d be:
   An ordinary man in fact, like you or me.

   The most successful of his poems are made from the tension
between the formal in structure (iambic pentameter, rhymes) and
the conversational in tone. There are some striking examples where
the reined‑in lines deal with dramatic subject‑matter (‘A Case of
Murder’, ‘Psychopath’, ‘Schoolroom on a Wet Afternoon’ and the
‘Epithets of War’ sequence.
  
   Scannell brings the same approach to Behind the Lines published
in his 82nd year. One has to admire his dedication to the craft of
poetry, but unfortunately his subject‑matter here is mainly domestic,
personal and occasional, and this does not bring out the best in his
gifts. There are too many prosy thoughts and low‑key musings of an
obvious kind, and much of the book is frankly dull. Where Scannell
does attempt his old subject‑matter, as in ‘God and Thomas
Hamilton’, about the Dunblane Massacre, the climax is bathetic:

   No‑one could guess, when he entered the school,
   where, shortly before, they had sung
   Their simple sweet hymns, his revered Smith and Wesson
   Would be used by its owner to teach them a lesson.

   The real achievements here are a handful of poems in which the
darker side of his imagination seems fully engaged, including the title-poem (another war poem), ‘The Long Corridor’, and ‘Prodrome’,
both full of mystery and foreboding, and especially ‘A Small Hunger’
about a father’s cruelty over a trick played with a present, which
ends:

   What lay beneath deceitful wrappings teased
   And floated on mad laughter down the years,
   The ghost of a small hunger unappeased.

There is an obvious link, apart from an adherence to the clear
and the comprehensible between Scannell and Lucas, in that
the former’s book has been published by the latter. The title The
Long and the Short of it tells us what we are in for: slices of life,
reminiscence, anecdotes, all companionably told. You can dislike
Lucas – you might wish for something of more substance – it is all so
amiable, lively, wide‑ranging, well‑shaped. If poetry was a popular
art, you feel, then Lucas could be one of the most popular of poets.
But it isn’t, and this leads him to indulge his learning rather too
much, and to use too wide a vocabulary: there were words here
‘archimandrites’, ‘craquelure’, ‘thrasonical’, ‘cabochon’ that I had
never come across before.
  
   I like Lucas’s poems best when they are full of the words of
others, as if his own voice was only one of the many he wished to
record, and his previous collections (this is his seventh) contained
more of these. I notice that (unlike his academic work) his poetry
has never appeared from a mainstream publisher, and this seems
appropriate for one with something of a radical, iconoclastic streak,
and this is also something that I admire in him, but this quality, too,
seems muted here.
  
   The best poems in the book are at the beginning, particularly
those about his mother:

   It’s Sunday, six o’clock. I lift the phone
   To make the usual call, then put it down.
   Though your ‘Hello’, Mum, echoes in my head,
   I can’t talk (can I?) to someone three months dead.

I can’t get so enthusiastic about the occasional pieces that follow.
  
   The second, and by far the longest, section of the book is taken up with exercises in a variety of styles, covering a range of subjects.
They include an alphabet poem, a jazz history poem, various
satirical squibs and an extended defence of rhyme, but I was left
with a feeling of limitation rather than empowerment. I turned from
forced jollity to the two translations which end the book, one from
the Old Norse, and one from the Greek. I cannot comment on
their accuracy but I found here an engagement and a solidity which
seemed lacking elsewhere.

Judy Gahagan’s book is very different from the two so far
considered. First of all, it is all of a piece: her work is consistent in
style and subject‑matter, and one either rejects it or swallows it
whole. It would certainly not be to everyone’s taste, being romantic,
full‑blooded, intense (humour is in short supply), reactionary in
terms of rejecting most of the trappings of the modern world, and
intricately wrought. It is a kind of high‑keyed evocation of low spirits. Metaphors abound. One poem ends:

   There’s nowhere to go. No escape from fast turn‑over
   from the sell‑outs and free‑falls
   the one‑fell‑swoop take‑over
   which make all that is solid melt into air

which is both a reflection on contemporary attitudes and a
description of swifts in flight.
  
   This book is even more unified than Gahagan’s first book,
Crossing the No‑man’s Land (Flambard 1999), from which she
imports two poems. Everything here revolves around night or
carries a reference to darkness in some form. Even a poem about
Venice, a place of light and sparkle if ever there was one, has the
lines :

   the black gondola is shaped for paranoia
   threading its needle
   through the backwaters of the unconscious

and is entitled ‘Get Out of Here’.
  
   The poems are beautifully articulated but eschew traditional
forms (an exception is a wonderful sestina ‘solstice’). The only
poems which don’t seem to work are those where the poet
chooses to embrace the modern. ‘Polytechnic’ is an example, but
when she moves onto the lake in a university’s grounds she is back
in her element:

   in the secret reaches
   each tall willow has one huge branch split
   from reaching down
   in thirst, in longing
   for the water’s black sleep.

With Myra Schneider we are in the hands of a hugely experienced
writer. this is her eighth full‑length collection in twenty years, and she has consistently grown in confidence and stature over the period. Consequently she is able to achieve both variety and coherence in the one volume. At the outset I have to declare an interest, since I was the author’s first publisher, and have seen all these poems in their various versions prior to publication.
  
   Briefly, Schneider’s virtues of a highly developed sensual
imagination, broad human sympathies, an appreciation of spiritual
qualities, and a devotion to the craft of poetry, have to be set against
her seeing writing as a personal therapeutic necessity (which could
limit its universal appeal) and a tendency to over‑explicitness, to
‘load the rift with ore’ out of an anxiety to get her message across.
  
   Multiplying the Moon marks a milestone in Schneider’s quest
to widen her scope and clarify and condense her intuitions. It is
a long book (116 pages) and covers a spectrum of experience.
The individual poems range from the domestic to the foreign in
terms of holiday encounters, fruit, flowers, creatures and reactions
to paintings and music. It is no coincidence that there are three
poems inspired by paintings by Matisse – surely one of the small
band of artists most likely to appeal to her because of his command
of colour? Then there are three sequences: one ‘Openings’ quite
various in subject‑matter but bound together by the idea enshrined
in its title; one ‘Finding My Father’ which continues the theme of
parental relationship familiar from earlier collections, and this time based upon census records; and the third, most poignantly, stemming from the traumatic experience of breast‑cancer. Two longer poems complete the book. The shorter of these, ‘Orpheus in the Underground’, is an 8‑page exploration of the legend transported (pun intended) to 21st century London. ‘Voice‑Box’ is an ambitious undertaking made up of 21 individual poems in the voices of four actors in a narrative. Its subject, as so often with this author, is the tribulations of communication and relationship, but never before attempted on this scale, and without a commentary of any kind.
  
   It is impossible in a short review to do justice to the richness
contained between these covers. Instead I will take one poem to
illustrate qualities found in abundance throughout, a delicious 39‑line
mini‑essay on the virtues of the grape, a fruit beguilingly described at
the outset as the poet opens her larder on ‘an exuberant wink’. The
poem ends with these lines:

   Even now I can smell the muskiness

   at the heart of the clustered grapes,
   the same darkness that inhabits
   the thicket in the park, hatches

   moth wings, hides muddles
   of draggled feathers as they disintegrate.
   But these purple bubbles are indifferent

   to my fear of losing everything. Glimmering
   like laughter, they insist on the moment –
   tipping it raw into the mouth.

   Here the six metaphors/similes effortlessly reinforce each other to create an image of both mystery and attraction, assisting the poem to attain a climax of satisfying immediacy in the words ‘tipping it raw’. the author has no designs upon us but that of sharing sensual delight.
  
   Myra Schneider is in the enviable position of being one of the few poets today with an audience beyond that of a literary coterie. That is because she has stubbornly adhered to an approach which combines human interest, force of feeling, and comprehensibility.
Her growing readership will welcome this addition to a body of work both prodigal and humane.

   Myra Schneider is the link to my last collection. as a Poetry School tutor and a founder member of the Second Light women’s poetry network, she is well qualified to co‑edit with Caroline Price an anthology of the work of fourteen women poets who are beginning to build reputations. It is in fact a model of how to produce such a book. Each poet is given space for a number of poems or a sequence, and there are a biographical note and a photograph. Paper, typography and binding are of excellent quality. There is an attractive cover, and an intriguing title Four Caves of the Heart. All a potential buyer needs to know is ‘Are the poets worth reading? The answer from this reviewer is a resounding ‘yes!’ The most striking thing about the book is its consistency. Open it at almost any page and you will be engaged by bold ideas, inventive language, admirable craft. I was particularly struck by the poems of Anne Ryland, Maggie Sawkins, Mary Macrae, Barbara Marsh and
Lynne Wycherley. Here is an extract from a poem by the last-named:

   Today we will walk
   with the shearlings and ewes,
   the gimmers and hoggets,
   on gritstone slopes
   where weathers brawl

   and the Sswale untwists
   its brown story,
   peat‑stained water
   plunging from the rocks,
   swinging a cold, curved blade…

   Invest in this anthology, and look out for individual collections
from all of these writers.