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

     In a recent article in The Independent Thomas Sutcliffe made the intelligent and deeply unfashionable recommendation that “we should occasionally approach great books as if they were going to demand an explanation of why they should be bothered with us, rather than the other way around”. A corollary to this is the suggestion that, upon finishing any book, we might usefully ask ourselves, “what would be this book’s opinion of me?” It is, however, a question which in the present context this reader’s vanity makes him reluctant to ask, for he knows that at best Tony Lucas’s ambitious and troubling new collection of poems would merely look upon him with distaste. It is not that Lucas’s verse has no time for its readers, indeed the central problem with several of these poems is that they display too great an awareness of an audience, but rather that it courts a silence from those readers which, ultimately, one is reluctant to provide.

     Locally, these difficulties and demands are manifest in the endings of individual poems. Lucas’s verse relishes closure, and many of his pieces conclude with a knowing and self-satisfied flourish, unveiling a single image or verbal trick which is both pleased with itself and confident of pleasing a reader. In the worst instances a poem lives only for its ending. The sole purpose of comparing a stone to “a living thing” in ‘Still Life’ is to allow the poet to conclude with the complacent inversion of a cliché:

          If it were thrown,
or dropped and broken, you might
even get blood from a stone.  

     In ‘One That Got Away’ a policeman retrieves a crash helmet from the narrator’s suburban garden, and yet the poem ends with the narrator observing that

the red crash helmet had been left behind,
plumb in the middle of our neat green lawn,
a circus nose, bright
and abandoned, unidentified.

Here, the difficulty lies partly in the weakness of the metaphor. The image of the circus nose is too trite to serve as an illuminating or resonant trope, and not amusing enough to justify or support an air of mock-seriousness which one might generously choose to identify. Furthermore, neither the significance of the forsaken helmet nor the purpose of the metaphor is made apparent by the lines which precede this conclusion. Some will claim that through its detachment the poem’s conclusion is itself an emblem of the abandoned helmet, although to do so would be to move dangerously close to arguing that this ending is deliberately bad. The culminating image becomes an offering to the reader, an isolated and narcissistic exhibit that asks for nothing more than to be gazed upon, and silently admired. Indeed the experience of reading Rufus at Ocean Beach is often akin to viewing a largely unremarkable collection of paintings or photographs. Having quietly taken in yet another poem with a self-important ending, the reader merely stares for a few moments before rapidly proceeding to the next piece. The time devoted to each individual poem, and the amount of comment generated progressively decreases, and the reader becomes, albeit for very different reasons, the silent spectator for which this volume of poetry so often yearns. 

     The question is whether this is indicative of a problem in the poetry or the reader. The comparison of these poems to exhibits in a gallery is one which, to a certain extent, Lucas would wish to encourage.  In ‘Summer, 1945’ the poet refers to himself as a camera, and his verse is intrinsically visual. Many poems invite the reader to peer over Lucas’s shoulder as he describes the scene, and the surrounding land- or seascape which he sees before him. Occasionally the results are impressive, as in the opening lines of ‘First Light’: “The plover, squat upon the morning rocks/ tucks in his bib and runs to breakfast”. Later in the same poem the narrator passionately declares:

We have not deserved this clarity of light,
the rinsing air, the waters rippling and benign.
This morning is a gift and asks for no return.
Men with their dogs stand gazing out to sea
at nothing, simply for pleasure of pure sight.

     Lucas’s poetry frequently praises, defends and strives to encourage such “pure sight”. “Observe the solitary heron/ gliding down the brook” is the command issued by ‘Change Of Use’, while ‘A Salt Lagoon’ ends in an unusually provocative manner, daring the reader to break the silence and declare that it is not enough for a poem simply to regard the natural world.

…nothing seems to change along the shore.
It’s like a place that’s always waiting for us,
deep in stillness, asking – Do you look for more? 

It is a question this reader continually asks himself as he wanders through Rufus at Ocean Beach. Those who admire all of Lucas’s work could plausibly argue that the difficulties and objections I have described above stem not from faults in the verse, but from my own hostility towards poetry which humbly seeks to describe a scene or prospect. Yet this is poetry which all too often seeks an audience not for the situations or issues with which it purports to engage, but for its own ostentatious tricks, tropes and finales. ‘A Papyrus In The Ashmolean’ exhibits the more alarming consequences of this tendency in its final stanza:

Split and discoloured, behind glass
the brash black letters, briskly dashed
across their sheet, can short-circuit
all those years touching us
closer than the bas-reliefs, the amulets,
canopic jars that cluster dustily around-
with common values, proof against decay.

     In its eagerness to resolve the relationship between both past and present, and art and life, this poem is incapable of affording such issues the scrutiny and argument that they deserve. Indeed, Lucas’s verse appears untroubled by this limitation, secure in the belief that it has enlightened and reassured its readers, and rendered further questioning unnecessary. Need we look, or ask for more? Ironically, it is the strongest poems in Rufus at Ocean Beach which ensure that, ultimately, one responds to this question with an emphatic “yes”:

Now by my careful science
I have fathered her, so I desire
that she be fruitful in the evidence
she bears, and will embrace
this bonding of her name with mine,
as wax that takes the imprint
of the mind, compliant,
matrix of our shared posterity.
          (‘The Archaeologist’)

Few of Lucas’s poems are granted a conclusion that so successfully combines a genuine sense of closure with a willingness to retain the full complexity of a situation. The narrator’s equivocal fantasies enact a struggle between past and present, which is mirrored in the poem’s shifting and ambiguous language in subtle and difficult ways which this review cannot begin to address. ‘The Archaeologist’, unlike so many of Lucas’s pieces, demands a reader who is prepared to pay it frequent visits, continually questioning and engaging with its complexities. Other poems from Rufus at Ocean Beach will not heed the objections raised against them, and will instead continue to reflect such difficulties back onto a reader who must continually ask himself whether this is a cause for celebration or concern.