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

Across the Grid of Streets by Quincy R. Lehr 
(Seven Towers, 2008)
Miss Moon’s Class by Viki Holmes
(Inkstone Books, 2008)

Quincy R. Lehr’s collection, Across the Grid of Streets opens with the poem ‘A Shot Rang Out’. A gritty, conversational piece executed in effortless blank verse, the iambic pentameter unostentatiously carrying along the noir effects of cigarettes, booze and gun fire:

A fugue of drunken rants and engines belching
With little variation.

Here and there a feminine ending and trochaic substitute keeps the poem from dropping into a metronomic pace.

This first piece is an accurate representation of the poems to follow: street life, anger, alcohol, despair and wit all neatly tied together with metre and rhyme. This is not just a book of guns and drink, though. Love, sex, family and death are also explored in an informal, but often poignant tone.

There are some impressive longer sequences in this book, particularly ‘The Joke’. A kind of Waste Land of traditional forms: Anglo-Saxon alliterative, ballad, a variety of rhyme schemes. At times this can veer a little too close to gimmick, for example when Lehr switches from heroic couplets to terza rima in the middle of a page. However, on the whole it keeps the pace of the poem moving along nicely and yields some impressive lines:

Beyond this room, these off-white walls, that door
With bolted locks, the outside’s notional.
Pastiched from knee-jerk hunches at its core.
Let’s not get too emotional,

Since if I don’t quite mean the things I say
Or don’t know why I mean them, it’s not spite
Or purred mendacity that sets the way
The syllables escape.

                                                                   ‘The Joke’

Lehr’s forte in this book is a cynical lyric eye evoking with vivid accuracy a slightly grubby but beautiful world:

Along the street outside, the chilly glow
Of streetlights rakes the slate-grey shits of snow.

                                                        ‘Continental Drift’

While Lehr takes what is ostensibly an unpoetic landscape and successively makes poetry from it Viki Holmes, in her collection Miss Moon’s Class, presents herself with what is a far trickier endeavour: to tread well-worn poetic paths and to try and make something new. Holmes does achieve some excellent phrases and images in this collection:

cooking is like breathing
simple until you think
about what it takes

                                                       ‘ron making curry’

Occasionally they occur in poems that have been hobbled by a lack of rhythm. The verse is free and unrhymed, but rather than allowing Holmes to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, as Pound suggested, it seems too often to deaden her ear:

“this is
my
dreaming
the most beautiful
place
so, you tell me
here
I have remembered this”

                                                                  ‘peninsular’

Certainly there are poems in here that shine out from the rest:

sometimes his thoughts are like the sea;
you could drown there, or wait at the shore
for the grass to grow. birds are the fish
of the sky, their calls like foam –

                                                           ‘creation myths’

Here the cadence is irresistibly hypnotic suiting the subject matter charmingly... Holmes also takes into account the physicality of the page. She doesn’t shy away from unexpected layout and use of punctuation enabling her to heighten many of her images and the impact they have on the reader:

thumbed 
                  eyelids, sleep 
                                    and this.

However, even when Holmes produces good poetry, there are some idiosyncrasies that I found distracting. She does not capitalise, even “I” is altered to “i”, and there is also an excessive fondness of footnotes. Do Teasmade and Han Solo really require them? And if so, why in the next poem is Tesco footnoted, but Wombles are not?

Considering these two collections together, one cannot help but agree with Auden that “the poet who writes ‘free’ verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself .”