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

In their first collection, many poets are inevitably finding their voice - trying various timbres and cadences, seeing what works best for them, with enough originality to make one look forward to a stronger second volume. By contrast, John Stammers enters the poetry ~u1d fully formed. His voice is witty, playful, self-deprecating but assured, and his characteristic mode is the meditation that picks its way artfully through the false starts and stops, the elisions and tangential flourishes, of memory. Weather Report, from which the book’s title is taken, is a reminiscence of a “seen better’ seaside hotel:

The tint of the raindrops’ perpetual concerto
misses, by about none,
the lilac of the waltzes of the tea room.
So much liquid, is it all required?
Take cappuccino or lip gloss,
those suspensions of our age,
or the actual rain.

The near-meaningless “misses, by about none” and the digression on other liquids with the high-sounding but mocking “those suspensions of our age” suggest a mind seriously at play. The clouds are compared to El Greco paintings (“the canvases like culture mediums, I spread with florets of grim hues”) and the poem moves on, noting death, silliness and desire with an unusual lightness of touch:

And, if to prove conclusively
that there is madness in Methodism,
the sign outside the mock-gothic hall says:
In the Midst of Life we are in Death
but you, you wear the ludicrous sea-side hats
of self-aggrandisement, as if the gust
that tossed the last one into the sea
was your own idea...

Stammers is doing something original here. He has taken a cliched situation - the hopefully sexy weekend by the sea with cliches from a thousand novels and films (the rain, the waltzes in the tearoom, the hat blowing off) - and treated it with such wit and relish that it feels new. I am struck by the surefootedness with which he avoids all the opportunities for misjudged bathos and false tone. And there is something else. The self and the other are not ridiculed; there is no sourness. Beneath the vivid surface there is an abiding sense that they could have made it together after all - the romantic myth that all relationships have potential.

Stammers’ originality here and in the more overtly erotic House on the Beach becomes even clearer in Testimony where a cultural visit to Dublin is rendered in literary critical terms, in the joyously freewheeling Torch and, most easily for demonstration purposes, in Certain Sundry Matters where the failure of a relationship is imaged as a visit to the Alps. The poem is an extraordinary interplay of legalistic terms (Inasmuch, whereas, so that, insofar, thereby), an echoic use of language

Inasmuch as you have ever heard a cowbell
extol the mountains that run under the cow
that’s wearing it, then the morning I most readily recall
was on the Col d’Aubisque...

phrases of phrasebook French and a finely judged sense of when ruefulness needs to be turned into a joke to save face:

and insofar as we started the road down together,
heading for the Horizon
(which was the car not the sierra,
which was the mountains not the car)
and it took us these years to get down from there...

Stammers is renewing the dramatic monologue with such a range of techniques and variety of tones that much other current poetry looks underwritten by comparison. He has learnt everything he needs from Frank O’Hara and Raymond Carver, and indeed Wallace Stevens, and has moved on into a style very much his own. For one thing, there is his pleasure in wordplay. In My Great Grandfather’s Graveplate at Gestingthorpe, the echoes and repetitions are sustained as a structural device:

Not a stone, but the type of wrought-iron
    graveplate they favoured hereabouts,
and maybe only hereabouts, in those days. Since
    way before DOMESDAY
BOOK they/we perpetrated our moniker
    nearabouts. On a day before doomsday
I brook no impulse to pray into the nil, but look:
    an alien in these whereabouts...

but in the end achieves something more:

               and perpetrate the glottal stop
that stops like a sonic vestige from the sl-slam
     of the ironmason’s hammer that yammers
at me to read and read again the name engraved
     on this readymade graveplate: John Stammers.

This is remarkable for its echoic language, its rendering of a stammer and its use of the poet’s own name. It is rare to see such a range of effects deployed with such concentration. Pleasure in the resources of language characterises all Stammers’ work, most extendedly in the jazz-like riffs of Aspects of Kees, a celebration of the life and death of the American poet, painter and jazz musician, Weldon Kees. One of the book’s few miscalculations is to omit the helpful background note to this poem that appeared on its first publication in Magma 12.

Second, although Stammers’ poems range widely in culture and location, he is visibly a Londoner born and bred. In My Great Grandfather’s Graveplate, he outlines his life as a modern Islingtonian:

                               on the Angel
    Islington square where these days I talk
the consequence of nothing and nothing of
    consequence, but once learned to walk
the hard walk, besport the two-tone Tonik
    mohair suit and perpetrate the glottal stop...

which captures the defiant strut needed to grow up in Inner London. Several poems, like The Tell which is based on an earlier male friendship, hint at a different, less reflective life lived in a then-unfashionable part of London, long before any thought of poetry. Although of a philosophical frame of mind, and indeed an Associate of King’s College which requires a very traditional theology course and betokens residual or past Christianity, Stammers comes over as what Cockneys might call a diamond geezer with all its associations of value, shine and former roughness.

Being a Londoner informs some of the poems in subtle ways. In The Infanta of Castile Rides out with Leopard, Parrot and Mandolin, a lively obeisance to Wallace Stevens, the fact that the Infanta rides on an elephant acknowledges that the South London district of Elephant and Castle derives from an ancient hostelry called the Infanta of Castile. And Torch gains from knowing that Holborn is pronounced without an ‘I’ and has a street viaduct, and also knowing that Tulsa Hill is a dullish suburb of South London when you come to the line

We were only twenty-four minutes from Tulsa Hill.

This is one of several places where I laughed out loud. Others included Feet about a chiropodist who can tell one’s poetic gift from one’s feet (and poems, of course, consist of feet) and So what do you do on your week off?, a splendid escape fantasy which includes an Anglo-Mexican attempt to create a homeland

with its capital as the Alamo singing:
And did those feet in ancient times...
in Spanish which is:
Y los pies en l’antigüedad...

Panoramic Lounge-Bar showcases a rich variety of forms and genres which are carried off with such panache that one suspects that there is a substantial body of work behind them. Yet each poem is visibly the work of someone who deals with experience philosophically in both senses of the word - who knows that most experience and all memory is a construct (as in naming some flowers Anstruthers in the book’s first poem) but can recount the construct, by turns ruefully and hilariously, for pleasure, as if lived. It is a masterful debut. Hopefully Picador will let us see more before long.