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

It’s hard to think of more intractable material for the poet than contemporary suburban England - soul-trashed by commerce, damp and inert, dimly lit with shafts of sunlight and a weird complacency. It offers Notes from a Small Island in verse.

     Many poets take refuge in what’s left of the countryside, in metaphysics, inner life and warm relationships. But Glyn Maxwell meets the challenge head-on, surveying the whole scene with extraordinary virtuosity. He conjures with mundane talk, probing its redundancies, truisms, appeals to solidarity and identity, its half logic, to produce a wonderful flow of pun, play and pathos. He creates a fast-changing kaleidoscope of quotidian plots, emblems, props and general clutter. But it goes well beyond pastiche. Gravitas and significance are always there too - he often draws them from the everpresent weather and turbulent skies of the English climate - and in the intensifying reflections on the world now. He sustains his high-wire act with distance, irony and flat emotional tone.

     His tour de force is the extended narrative. Three of his greats are here: the ‘Tale of the Mayor’s Son’, ‘Tale of the Chocolate Egg’ and ‘Out of the Rain’. This latter imagines the Great Flood, Arc animals, Noah and all engulfing the eternal Saturday night world here. This assembly from three collections illustrates his development into other territories and the moral voice behind his survey.

     In ‘Out of the Rain’ he confronts our apocalypse now. Here the flood leaves untouched the trivia, the matches, the shows: “Nothing has changed... Nothing has moved.” An intensifying sense of Maxwell’s moral presence accumulates through this volume. But it’s quietly there early on too: “When it gets late/ I walk, mild citizen/ of what’s suggested, what’s appropriate/ because it saves my neck” (‘Mild Citizen’). But it’s the later poems gather in the storm in ‘Don’t Waste Your Breath’, in ‘Song of Our Man’ and ‘The Boys at Twilight’, ending with the fine last poem ‘Stargazing’. Who are these boys of the collection title? Perhaps the spirit of Maxwell’s wunderkind brilliance. Perhaps the ceaseless puerile demands of contemporary capitalism. Perhaps our present Twilight of the Gods comes from the “boys’” unsustainable hegemony. That’s how I read it anyway. Maxwell would probably wince.

     He knows our place inside out. And you realise how much so when he strays into other territory - wealthy France, wealthy Europe, Los Angeles and his ease and command slip a little. Mystifying are his brief, unsuccessful, excursions into Fairy Tale, slightly uneasy to those into classical mythology. Losing height is risky. Also the largely and necessarily flat emotional tone becomes enervating over 125 pages. Nevertheless this selection of Maxwell’s work is to be bought and studied. Its subtlety is a kind of Duino Elegies of the Home Counties Now.