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

Charles Simic has a wonderful way of creating a world for the reader to enter. It’s a strange world, one in which nothing is quite as it seems, and anything can happen and frequently does. One of his poems, ‘Dream Broker’, almost tells us what he is doing as he nudges the everyday into the extraordinary and edges the extraordinary into the everyday:

You may find yourself with my help
Taking small, apprehensive steps
In a cabal of side streets,
Doorways on the lurk, dim store signs.
Insomnia Detective Agency, restorers
Of defaced and mislaid memories,
Are at your discreet service

It has the tension and suggestion of surrealism but tempers it with humour and a willingness to step beyond that framework into ideas that come close to the literal but never bog down in it. Some surrealist poetry can seem highly contrived but Simic always sounds perfectly natural:

I failed miserably at imagining nothing.
Something always came to keep me company:
A small nameless bug crossing the table,
The memory of my mother, the ringing in
                                                      my ear.
I was distracted and perplexed.
A hole is invariably a hole in something.

     One of the attractive things about Simic’s poems is that they’re mostly short. And it’s interesting that the one relatively-long poem is, to my mind, the least successful, its images seeming too disassociated to keep the momentum going. The surrealist angle took over and as the poem slipped away from the provocative so evident in the shorter pieces it appeared to lose its direction. This is a minor complaint, though, and most of Jackstraws adds up to lively and entertaining reading, with the dark humour always present:

The pages of all books are blank.
The late-night readers at the town library
Make no complaints about that.
They lift their heads solely
To consult the sign commanding silence,
Before they lick their finger,
Look sly, appear to be dozing off,
As they pinch the corner of the paper
Ever-so-carefully,
While turning the heavy page.

     I kept returning to this book and finding new things in poems I’d already read two or three times. It’s highly recommended.