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

“It is to the trivial we return to on real days” writes Allen in ‘At Helen’s Bay’, a deceptively simple poem that pads straight to the heart of the matter - how we come to terms with our own mortality - on steely feet of undeniable truth:

It comes to this, the one instant,
the wind-wet pilgrimage with newspaper
from promenade to retirement home:

and age is a plateau of small acceptances.

These man-made walls, with their canteen
                                                        dinners
and medicines smells, contain the images
of all our fears -

what it is to finally let go.

     This is a tough collection of poems that is shot through with anger and grief at the personal and political history of Northen Ireland. Allen has a spare style, often writing in couplets and single lines - concise, graphic accounts. In ‘Linen’, he tells of his grandmother working in the factory from the age of eleven, of the awful conditions and the particular gruesome incidents which befall her and her friend. This would be a very good poem to read to children who are learning about Irish history, combining fact with emotion, as it does, with great economy.

     Like so many Irish writers, Allen is both drawn to and repelled by religion and its power over people. There are several darkly ironic poems with religious titles such as ‘The Great Redeemer’, ‘Benediction’, ‘Hymnal’, ‘Testament’, in which Allen retaliates against powerful figures of his past. In ‘Testament’, a poem about the death of his grandfather, Allen approaches the subject of religious belief, how easily it turns into bigotry and how seamlessly it is passed down from generation to generation within families. His narrative voice moves somewhat disconcertingly between that of an adult and a child as he wrestles with the terrible contradictions that are presented by ordinary working men, who, while generally keeping a strict moral code of behaviour, can be very specific when it comes to breaking the heads of unemployed Catholics outside the shipyard gates:

Their laws were clear, if not always just,
and need not be spoken to elicit fear,
like Jesus, who hung in every room,
they could see wrongdoing in a child’s face.

On his grandfather’s death bed, Allen is able to enact revenge on him as he whispers blasphemously into his dead ear “Your God is dead”.

     The title poem, ‘Languages’, is less successful in my view. Here, Allen seems to have sacrificied metrical rhythm and clarity of thought for the sake of too much information and the result is both confusing and prosaic. It seems to be an angry poem addressed to his father that does not have an obvious connection to the title, unless it is about the extent to which meaning can hide within language itself.

     Mostly these spare poems emerge from a Celtic landscape with singular caustic cadences. A pity, perhaps, that this dark collection is not leavened by some contrasting notes of lightness and affection.