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

John Kinsella, the new co-editor of Stand, with seventeen books of poetry to his name, five in England, had a close encounter in the Australian outback when he was ten, sighted an alien craft with his mother in 1973, which was recorded by the Australian Air Force, his aunt-in-law is one of a group of people from Western Australia who claim to have been abducted, and this book is a sequence of cadenzas on extraterrestriality. Professor Harold Bloom refers to his “fecundity and splendour... unique in a poet of his age... and so clearly destined to become part of the central tradition”. Helen Dunmore says he “writes a brilliant new Australian pastoral... like an Australian storm at full-blow”.

‘A Bright Cigar-Shaped Object Hovers over Mount Pleasant’ is one of the more accessible and nightmarish poems and also hints more directly, but also ‘alienatingly’ in the Brechtian sense, at social actualities. A bright cigar-shaped object “darts/ and jolts across the demarcation lines/ of class that aren’t supposed to exist in Australia”:

...It follows the line of my escape -
route from school, the same route a man
without a face in a dark car crawls along,
calling to me as I break into a run,
the car door opening and a clawed hand
reaching out to drag me in, the cigar -
shaped object stopped stock still
and hovering like the sun, hovering
as if it’s always been in that spot, always
been overhead, as hot as hell despite
the cold setting in, the sweat emanating
from my forehead, the light bright in my eyes.

I don’t rise to this work with the enthusiasm of Bloom and Dunmore. Is the passage above, for instance, interestingly-enough written? Aren’t there too many cliches like “stock still”, “crawls along”, even the curiously enjambed “escaperoute”, “sweat emanates”, “light bright in my eyes”? It relies on syntax rather than phraseology for excitement. The poems often read like prose reports of psychotic episodes, in spite of much technological jargon elsewhere.

     So: how to take all this? The poetry is in the improbable, yes: to suggest the limitations of common sense and the senses; to imply that, either through puberty, the ouija board, crop circles, falling satellite débris and meteor-rubble, or actual close encounters, we can be shown that the sky’s a sort of stage back-drop, as it undoubtedly is. I’m as convinced as Kant that time and space are illusions created by our human apparatus. Evolution will perhaps take us into a consciousness more cosmic, either in this world, the next, or others. But these clever cold poems are teasing rather than revealing. They’re far from enhancing the mystery of being alive I find in our wonderful senses, our relationships, our human feelings and insights, to say nothing of intimations of immortality. I feel the awelessness I get watching Uri Geller. It looks like a stunt. This undoubtedly shows my limitations, though, and others will find this a tour de force, “poetry’s answer to the X-files”.