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

With virtuosity comes exuberance and a confidence that thrills the reader. Reading this recent compilation of old and newer work is like watching the acrobat floodlit on the high wire. Poems of such linguistic daring-do and ‘look-mano-hands’, (a peculiarly male quality; I can think of only one female poet, Amy Clampitt,who really has it), that there’s seems to be little Edwin Morgan can’t do. From the marvellous Stanzas of Jeopardy (Dies Irae 1952) to his most recent work, his ideas, images, poetic resources are prodigious. Maybe too much so. For the accompanying sang froid allows him to republish, for example, the experimental concrete poems of the 60s, which though fun, were really passing curiosities with little scope for development.

     We have too, for the first time in book form, the entire Sonnets for Scotland that, though brilliant and crackling with linguistic energy, are very hard work. It’s in these Sonnets he’s in his cosmic element, search-lighting pre-history, post-history and some impenetrably idiosyncratic vignettes from history itself, Scotland providing the ignition. These Sonnets illustrate his absolutely modern spirit: young, dizzy, hebephrenic, restless, brilliant - and exhausting, but perfectly contained within traditional metre and form:

Flapping, fluttering, like imploding porridge
being slowly uncooked on anti-gas,
The Grampians were a puny shrinking mass,
of cairns and ski-tows sucked back to their
origins

     The new Planet Wave is in scope similar to the Memories of Earth of the 70s but recast in a new register for performance and musical setting:

Think about that, me, it
as I recall it now, swinging in my spacetime
                                                   hammock,
nibbling a moon or two, watching you.

Maybe too prodigious. Being dazzled isn’t the same as being disarmed. There’s a compulsive unflinching brilliance about some of his work that makes you return with relief to the intimacies (though just as effortless and fluent) of The Second Life collection of the 60s:

No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,
your cigarette glowed on my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey...

and some of the exquisite miniatures of the 70s Instamatic Poems:

and it is the long drones that are speckled,
carved in clusters of elegant bands
of creamy horn and dark brown wood,
but speckled are the high tenement walls
                                               behind them,
dark stone, pale mortar, narrow verticals

     There’s nothing Edwin Morgan can’t do with absolute ease except, perhaps, let a poem sit for a moment and reflect in the twilight. Maybe when he gets old he’ll be able to do that.