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

Jim Greenhalf has been writing and publishing poetry for almost thirty years without his work having received the critical attention many would say it deserves. This neglect might once have been put down to the fact that he has lived and worked in darkest West Yorkshire all this time, but a northern provincial background has been no impediment to the establishment of quite a few big, or biggish, reputations in the past few decades: the names of Tony Harrison, Simon Armitage and the Ians, Duhig and McMillan, come readily to mind. Part of the cause might be that Greenhalf’s work is not easy to categorise. While it is always perfectly comprehensible, often witty and entertaining, it avoids the meretricious and disposable superficiality of “performance poetry”.

     This, his latest collection, is probably his best so far. These poems deal almost without exception with the accidie, frustrations and nostalgia of middle age, and the urban imagery of their principal northern locus works as an effective extended metaphor for this condition while creating a powerful representation of the reality. This might make the book sound like a gloomy read but, on the contrary, it is always engaging, often funny and occasionally moving.

     Greenhalf is in command of an unobtrusively confident technique and his diction, which has its source in the common speech of his time and place, with a seasoning of transatlantic vernacular, works very well. While a few of the pieces are little more than versified anecdotes and there are a few perfunctory bits of rather prosy sententiousness, most of these poems are well-made, unpretentious and, in their different ways, very enjoyable. ‘Gelignite - The Old Man’s Friend’, which ends the volume, is a rumbustious variation on the same theme that Larkin plays on in ‘The Old Fools’ and ‘Tell Me If You Ever Hear Of Them Again’ is a wickedly funny comment on the current absurdities of poetry prizes and publicity games. It begins

I surveyed the list of the lucky five,
chosen to go forwards for the Backwards Prize.

Mel Muffy:
Exploring My Arsehole With An Electron Laser,
The Vex Press...

and it gets better.

     The publishers, Redbeck, have done a nice production job, though a bit of biographical information on the cover would have been useful.