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

Waiting For The Invasion is a rarity among collections of contemporary verse in that it is beguilingly readable from start to finish. The book is divided into two sections, the first and longer containing poems dealing with the author’s wartime childhood and adolescence in working-class Nottingham and the second with more general and historical views of the same locus. He writes movingly and often amusingly about the child’s experience of movies, the mysteries of sexual attraction and the Elementary School where “English was Poetry/ and the three-pronged tawse,/ a plaited whip of leather./ It set the hands on fire/ and taught us to be quiet../ Our teachers did not love us./ We did not love our teachers”.

     The stanza quoted above will illustrate Buttress’s prosodic method and its limitation in these poems which are often memorable but not for any resonance or haunting cadence of poetic line. One remembers them for their atmosphere and anecdotal interest, both of which are usually potent. The rhythms though are mechanical and unvaried and there is a total absence of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation”.

     Of course Buttress could plausibly argue that the singing line has no place in these sharply observed little narratives and evocation of a particular time and place and perhaps he would be justified in doing so. Nevertheless there were moments in the reading of these otherwise compelling poems when I would have welcomed some variety in rhythm and, if I dare suggest it, the use of the echoing and mnemonic chime of rhyme. Be that as it may, Waiting For The Invasion is a thoroughly enjoyable book, very attractively produced by the Shoestring Press, and one I am sure you will wish to read more than once.