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

Anthony Edkins is a well-read, urbane stylist who has a reputation for translating Spanish poetry and whose own work carries an international or supranational quality, at times reading like translation from another language. This leads him occasionally into an excessive use of abstract language as in the first stanza of ‘Expulsion from Eden’ where we find nine abstract nouns in nine short lines: “I find/ there is only a slim membrane/ between innocence and knowledge/ between the mind’s virginity/ and its experience;/ this skin/ dividing imagination,/ misconception, self-delusions/ and illusions from barefaced truth”. This kind of writing is exactly what Ezra Pound rightly warned poets against in ‘The Art Of Poetry’. However, Edkins shows elsewhere that he can write poems that are witty and elegant and can communicate interesting ideas and emotions through concrete images as in ‘Repentant Piracy’, ‘Field of Vision’ and the excellent ‘An Essay On Reading’. ‘A Conversation About Nostalgia’ is one of the many wry slants on the slipperiness of words and meanings of which none is so neat or more telling than ‘Telling The Truth’. Here is its conclusion: “Truth has never done/ anyone / anything but harm:/ best shun it./ It’s time the truth was told”.

     Life As It Comes is a collection by a civilised, thoughtful writer for whom the work of other poets is a frequent stimulus and there are direct or oblique references to, among others, Homer, Auden, Rimbaud, Wallace Stevens and Paul Valery. This is not to say that Edkins is a stuffily ‘literary’ poet in any limiting sense. On the contrary this is a collection of highly readable and sometimes memorable poems carefully crafted with subtle rhythms and cadences.