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

I would go down to the crossroads
if I could be arsed. But my mojo’s
not working in facts it’s not even
taxed or tested and what with
cigarettes and the hassle of making
your own...

The overriding tone of the poem comes from the talk and landscape of poverty - cultural and economic - its pubs, dismal housing, inchoate rages, one-liners, sex wars and the microhorizons that furnish popular entertainment. Thus is stays for the most part on safe ground since it’s now axiomatic that it’s in this domain lies ‘real’ life and ‘real’ language. Like restricted code it’s context and audience dependent and its value lies in the moment - it’s performance poetry. The review, rooted implicitly in abstract judgments, has no real place here.

     But Cadwallender is not content playing to only one gallery and wants to play to the stalls as well: a snatch of French, the passing reference to painting, to “movements”, in short, to big ideas as in the poem ‘listen, listen’, and stretches of a very different order of writing (from ‘Reveries on Dylan Thomas’):

...outside the singing house I waited to see the
staggering out and happiness poured into my
pitcher head. Him, in the stumble of words,
who never leashed me. But tonight the voices
are not real.. I am barking in mud on a dark
estuary...

All of which makes me think that he’s subverting his talent. I sense both kinds of poetry as overwhelmingly other-directed. If only he’d have the courage to leave behind the old staples from the ‘urban scene’ and strike out for a riskier sea his wit and love of language might take him on some longer journeys. On the other hand the hype he receives for staying with the safe, as judged by the cover quotes, will hardly help him move on.