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

There was a time, mostly in the 19th Century, when writers thought that the future would be utopian. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, to take just one example, proposed that the 21st Century would be one of peace and plenty. In its day it was highly influential among a wide range of people. Does anyone read it now other than with a sense of curiosity about how anyone really believed that things could get better? Our writers always have a dystopian view of the future and see it as offering little more than a grim prospect of wars and food shortages and environmental catastrophe.

     And so it is in John Barnie’s Ice, his novel in verse form in which he constructs a world dominated by a new ice age where strange city states, largely existing underground, battle with each other for the scant resources still available. Some of the technical innovations of the 20th Century have survived, but they are set alongside a return to almost-primitive routines of social interaction and violence. In the meantime, ‘Command’ rules in a manner reminiscent of Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

     In some ways, Barnie’s book throws up reminders of all kinds of literary and visual precursors, from numerous science-fiction novels about bleak new worlds to Hollywood movies about future wastelands. There’s a tough hero in the Assault Corps, a girl he fancies, battles in the snow, and the final days in the tunnels that honeycomb the underground city. It’s mostly vivid and fast-moving, but there are lyrical passages where the hero, shown to have a conscience and some tender spots, encounters occasional oddballs who have somehow survived the descent into barbarism. A librarian struggles to preserve his collection of books, a singer recalls the past, and a comedian (of the kind we’d call ‘alternative’) satirises ‘Command’. And romance blossoms as the heroine gives the hero some seeds she’s acquired and he nurtures them in a small tray of soil he has illegally obtained. You can see the potential for a film version of Ice just from my short summary of its plot.

     Of course, the big question is, does it work as a poem? I have to admit that I’m not enthusiastic about long poems in general and ‘novels in verse’ in particular. A straightforward novel might do the job just as well and be easier to read, though some would doubtless say that this is a philistine attitude. But I did find Ice quite easy to get to grips with, largely I suspect because I just took it as a form of prose. There are few, if any, passages which hold up the action and the language is mostly direct and clear. It’s true that very few phrases or lines stay in the mind in the way that good poetry can do, but at least the overall effect is to make certain scenes have a lingering effect. In that respect, Ice again reminded me of a film, and this is, I suppose, a tribute to its visual impact.