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

Amanda White, with an evident gift of a tongue in her head, is evacuating the indignities of family life and sexual relationships.

     First fumbling love, foody meetings with an ex-father, a bottom-pinching uncle who gives her “a well-concealed tongue kiss”, the boredoms, unhappinesses and bad sex of marriage, infidelities... In ‘Bad Sex on a Sunday’ “It seemed they ought to make the effort/ after sitting in separate rooms for a week...” The woman is left “masturbating over/ Gregory Peck in the afternoon/ on the old portable in the bedroom”.

     She squeezes the facts out like blackheads, a repeated image. She has been conditioned into much that disgusts her and is evidently eager to uncover the latent wounds - as a way perhaps of shedding bad habits? She’s also disgusted by much of the life in others.

The pier, half-land, half-sea, is open,
ten-minute speedboat rides at the end by
                                            Dixieland Disco
(first tongue-kiss), glass animals
pleading to escape and a girl I went
to school with is giving out change in the
                                       amusement arcade.
She had big tits when she was ten, we were
                                                 jealous then...

     The book is like a slow painful convalescence from adolescence, though she is 34; but of her mother she can say “I don’t want to murder you now/ just cook away afternoons swapping recipes”.

     There are signs of distancing in a poem like ‘The Giraffe House’, where the giraffes, “untroubled by good or bad reviews”, blink out at:

that other life they have only heard about,
passing by, there below, somehow hard
to focus on from such a height...

     There is real unhappiness in the personae of this first volume.

...The dark comes earlier, creeping up
from the kitchenette where indecisions and
                                              bad memories
have been divided by sensible cutlery that
                                             could still cut a
wrist if you wanted but butter crackers
                                           before bed instead.

     If a bad depression is at the back of this creativity, the poet’s evident intelligence, outspokenness and gift of the gab offer a good prognosis.