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

The 6000 ton radar island is the first in a circle of outer warning stations/ occupies the exact site of the original building and is the same in every detail/ at night in the deep and dead time, he hears again the soft scraap of his curette against the uterus wall in a room that holds no other sound/ this continuous activity of God is not to be thought of as if it were the insertion of creatures into a time-flow which existed antecedently to the/ helicar, a combination of automobile and helicopter/ ‘But Mr. Elephant hasn’t been near the canvas!’ ‘Amazing! Surrealists try to paint without thinking, but this is painting without painting! He has achieved pure art!’/ Fiona thought hard for a moment of a negro Staff-Sergeant whom she had once seen throwing the whole of the University Jazz Club into a prolonged ecstasy with an erotic and protracted paradiddle/ there was some excitement, and ‘Vote Auden’ was chalked up on the walls of New College/ the same night, on the old horn gramophone (with an emotion so deep that it was almost horror) I heard some amateur’s recording of the old poet reciting the lines which begin/ the ease of loading, the push-button starting, the constant filtering of the water!/ one of his most beautiful poems pictures his poignant sensations as he comes from a quiet hour within dim, organ-haunted shadows out into the sunlight, where the careless athletes are running bare-leggedly past him/ he thought he shouldn’t have poll-parrotted his life away in humbug and/ stood ready to scramble aircraft aloft to intercept any unidentified planes that turned up on the screens/ and thus score tremendous results in training our people in immeasurable love for the country as well as in revolutionary optimism for our future.