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

J C Hall Long Shadows, 130pp, £8.95
Shoestring Press, 19 Devonshire Avenue, Beeston, Nottingham NG9 1BS
Roddy Lumsden Mischief Night, 176pp, £8.95
Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland NE48 IRP
Mary Oliver Wild Geese, 160pp, £7.95
Bloodaxe Books
Alden Nowlan Between Tears and Laughter, 160pp, £7.95
Bloodaxe Books
Dean Young Ready‑Made Bouquet, 119pp, £8.50
Stride Publications, 11 Sylvan Road, Exeter, Devon EX4 6EW

J.C. Hall’s Long Shadows is remarkable in spanning 64 years. It’s
brave too, including an early poem written in 1938 when he was 17. This is a long writing career, but a consistent voice, one that immediately struck me as very English – restrained, understated
– and often self‑deprecating. In one of several poems written to a
daughter, ‘Opus 1’, he says: ‘Half teasing, you enunciate my quaint/
Once so serious phrases. Not what you’d choose!’
  
   Although the poems are ‘roughly in chronological order’, the book is layered with time, as generations change places, or family and friends die. Time is more than slippery in ‘Little Sister’ when the
poem finally discloses that this sister was never born. In ‘Discovering
Flowers’, he moves backwards and forwards, remembering his
daughter and comparing himself and his mother:

   …I let go
   That longing my mother had. The hour
   Is spent. My child has run where she ran.
   And copes as she can

These are quiet poems, formally polished and rhyming with ease.
An elderly aunt of mine would love this book.

Mischief Night by Roddy Lumsden is an altogether noisier book
and not one to give my aunt, in spite of its being such good value,
with a sonnet sequence, a pamphlet and a whole bookful of new
poems, ‘The Drowning Man’ as well as a generous selections from
his previous three.
  
   In many of the new poems Roddy Lumsden’s still struggling with
‘the sleep‑thief lust’, joking in ‘Q’: ‘…today I realign / myself as leg
or breast man’. But in ‘Rain at Night’ he can deliver a more tender
and slower‑paced address that opens ‘Since you ask, lass, this is how I get to sleep’. He’s tender, too about ‘The Deaths of  Imaginary Friends’.
  
   The writing’s colourful, spiky, skilful, entertaining and thoroughly
– his word – fykesome. But what goes on behind the ‘circus music and the safe bet of trivia’ of ‘My Limbo’? He’s the Fool in a tragedy. For all the singing and trickery, and in spite of the pace
and excitement and my admiration for the writing that carries me
through the book, it’s the open sadness and the shadows in poems
like ‘My Solitude’ that stay with me:

                 [I] who can only focus
   on one thing at one time with any fullness,
   for whom grieving is just a vague stirring,
   slipping as I do into my sickness
   when danger starts up it’s solemn knocking.

Maybe I should introduce my aunt to him after all; she’d be very
kind to him.

I was introduced to Mary Oliver by American friends who thought
my library incomplete without her 1992 Selected – my ecology
library, that is. Her poems have long been popular beyond the
poetry world over there. Here, Neil Astley used her poem
‘Wild Geese’ (‘the world offers itself to your imagination’) as an
introduction to his Staying Alive anthology – that title’s hers, as well. (This Wild Geese selected overlaps the earlier one, but there are plenty of other poems too.)

   You get a feel for the book from poem titles: whelks, peonies,
alligator, hawk, goldfinches, poppies, egret, white flowers – all as
beautifully characterised as these white gannets she watches

   blaze down into the water
   with the power of blunt spears
   and a stunning accuracy

   She not only celebrates the detail of appearances, but says in
‘Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond’

   Every day I walk out into to the world
   to be dazzled, then to be reflective

The reflection is always joyful: even the fish those gannets feed on
‘then rise from the water / inseparable from the gannets’ wings’. I
could give this book to my elderly aunt, or to another writer. These
are consistently lovely and well made poems (though I’m less keen
on some of the more recent centred forms) – as one would expect of
the author of Rules for the Dance, her handbook on metrical verse.

   Reading all these poems at once, it strikes me that they’re about the world as we’d like it to be, a primal landscape in which wild geese don’t get their feathers waterlogged by oil spills. Mary Oliver lives on the New England coast. Whether her vision of a joyful relationship with the natural world translates at other than a sentimental level to a country where every last square yard is how
it is because of how humankind has worked the land, I’m not sure.
Certainly I bump up against the problem of a large Selected here:
together, all these poems are far too much of a good thing.

Wild Geese is number two in Bloodaxe’s ‘World Poets’ series, ‘major modern writers from Staying Alive’. The first is Canadian, Alden Nowlan’s Between Tears and Laughter. (These are economy‑sized Bloodaxe pages, by the way, lacking their usual generous margins that acknowledge a poem’s importance.)

   Where Mary Oliver’s poems are about our relationship with
the more‑than‑human world, Alden Nowlan writes of our human
relationships. His poems are moving, funny, wry, sharp, loving,
self‑deprecating. You never know quite where he’s going to come
from next, with titles like ‘Written While Waiting for another Chest
X‑ray’, ‘He sits down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded’,
or a poem about the exasperating kid who wanted to be a poet,
whom Nowlan realises ‘had been labouring to be me’; or a seagull
with a broken wing who scolds him ‘what you call your compassion
the conceit / that all living things are Alden Nowlan in disguise’.

   Nowlan’s positive too. He got there the hard way, working
through poverty, graft, illness. I’m bowled over by his open‑ness
and sometimes – yes, he deserves the word – wisdom. This doesn’t
make him hard on the reader, not at all, he doesn’t ask for heroics
and the poems are wonderfully easy to read aloud straight off the
page (fairly long and run‑on lines are common, these aren’t about
clever forms): the only thing that might trip you up is a catch in your
throat. The poems have a pace that keeps you turning the page for
another, the ‘just one more’ syndrome of late night reading. And
every time I turn a page I want to tell you about another one, so
here – almost at random – is ‘Bobby Sands’:

   And what of Bobby Sands? We talk too much,
   all of us. In common decency, don’t speak
   of him unless you have gone at least a day
   without food, and be sure you understand
   that he loved being alive, the same as you.
   Then say what you like. Call him a fool…

And here’s the book I’ve given myself: ‘fasten your seatbelt. enjoy
the ride’, says the blurb on Dean Young’s Ready Made Bouquet.
Exactly – and suspend disbelief, as you won’t have encountered
anything like these colloquial, vital, hilarious and deceptively wayward solid blocks of poems that suddenly turn on you and
astonish. The poem that starts with a skittish obsession with
hammers or a vacuum cleaners or wisteria turns out not to be at all
what you thought it was. I’m not sure what my American ecology
friends would make of this Pittsburgh poet, but they’d cheer at the
sentiment of ‘My People’, which comes at you with the clout Mary
Oliver makes me long for. It ends:

                               …Somehow
   we’ve managed to ruin the sky
   just by going about our business,
   I in my super XL, you in your Discoverer.
   A grudging and fat‑cheeked tribe,
   we breed without season, inadvertently
   or injected with quadruples. The gods
   we played with broke, they were made of glass.
   The trees our father planted we will not see again.