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

I am writing this shortly before Christmas. What follows is a selection of books any poetry lover would be pleased to find under the tree. Carcanet have published the Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams in two volumes, Volume I: 1909-1939 (579pp; £12.95) and Volume II: 1939-1962 (553pp; £12.95), edited by Christopher MacGowan (volume II with A. Walton Litz). These volumes gather all of WCW’s published poetry except for Paterson. They are vital to any student of twentieth-century poetry; they are full of pleasures and challenges for any reader. Carcanet are to be thanked and congratulated for producing these very substantial volumes at very accessible prices. Another big (very!) book which deserves a warm welcome is An Tuil: Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse edited by Ronald I. M. Black (Polygon. 825pp; £19.99). This a major bilingual anthology, with a lengthy introduction and helpful notes. There is good representation of the major figures that most readers will expect: Sorley Maclean, Derrick Thomson et al. But there are beautiful and fascinating poems by poets little-known outside the Gaelic-reading community. Readers whose native language is English often seem to know more about poetry in the major European languages than they do about the poetry of the “other” British languages. With Black’s help, learning something of the modern Gaelic achievement is now a good deal easier and the learning-experience is rich in rewards. A book I shall return to repeatedly, I am sure. Amongst other recent volumes of translation offering similar (if less bulky!) rewards is Yesterday’s Wilderness Kingdom (MPT Books, School of Humanities, King’s College, London, WC2R 2LS. 128pp; £8.95), which provides the French text of Yves Bonnefoy’s second book (first published in 1958) along with an excellent translation by Anthony Rudolf. Rudolf is one of our finest translators of modern French poetry, especially that of Bonnefoy, and this is work of the very highest quality, as one would expect from him. This is, to borrow a phrase from Rudolf himself, an “extraordinary and troubling book”, a profound encounter with time and death. Great poetry, marvellously translated. La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles en vers are altogether more earthy stuff. The reader whose only previous encounter with La Fontaine was with his Fables would be in for a surprise on opening up the Contes. This is not the world of Aesop; Boccaccio and Ariosto are more important influences here. The vitality and mischief of the Contes are generally well-caught in Guido Waldman’s translation of La Fontaine’s Complete Tales in Verse (Carcanet. 334pp; £14.95). The manner of Waldman’s translation has, as he himself says, more than a little of Ogden Nash about it. The idiom has its aptness and the results are delightfully entertaining. Playful in a rather different way are Dannie Abse’s Encounters (Hearing Eye, 99 Torriano Avenue, London, NW5 2RX. 21pp; £6.00), handsomely published in a limited edition of 500 copies. Here are versions by Abse from poems by Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Seifert, Gilboa, Rilke, Brecht and anonymous Welsh and red Indian poets. These are versions which might perhaps be best thought of, on the whole, as “variations” (in the musical sense) rather than “translations”. An earlier generation might have called them “Imitations”. Whatever one calls them, these are witty and seriously playful texts, fine examples of the creative encounter of one poet with another. Strongly recommended. Inger Christensen’s alphabet, translated by Susanna Neid (Bloodaxe. 80pp; £7.95) introduced me to the work of a Danish poet of obvious substance; based, structurally, on the Fibonacci sequence, this is an integrated collection which explores the human role in the natural world, raising questions one might loosely call both scientific and religious. This is challenging and exciting poetry.

   Amongst other recent publications from Bloodaxe there has been much that has been tempting. The prolific and (seemingly) endlessly inventive John Kinsella is represented by The Hierarchy of Sheep (Bloodaxe. 80pp; £7.95); Kinsella is, I suspect, constitutionally incapable of being boring, whether writing about termites or a Jackson Pollock, the streets of San Francisco or white cockatoos. Kinsella’s work displays a greedy appetite for experience and a considerable resourcefulness of technique. Fleur Adcock’s work is altogether quieter in manner, but her Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe. 287pp; £10.95) also demands attention. Adcock’s seeming simplicity of manner barely conceals a sharpness of mind that is often very penetrating and whether exploring memory and personal relationships, wryly observing the political world (“Can it be that I was unfair / to Tony Blair? / His teeth, after all, are beyond compare; / but does he take too much care / over his hair?”) or posing profound questions about personal and national identity, she is always stimulating reading. From Stride (11 Sylvan Road, Exeter, Devon, EX4 6EW) comes Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (199pp; £9.95) by Charles Wright. This is meditative writing simultaneously clear and heavy with meaning; evident influences include Chinese verse and Wright’s reading of figures as diverse as Meister Echart and Simone Weill. Wright’s are religious poems, albeit in an utterly nondenominational sense, often radiant in their responsiveness to landscape and (especially) sky. ‘Ars Poetica II’ ends with the declaration that “God is the fire my feet are held to” and the book as a whole invites reading as a kind of extended definition of how and what the poet might mean by the word “God”. Wright deserves to be better known amongst British readers than he presently is. The pleasures of Kit Wright’s work are generally of a rather lighter kind, and there many of them to be had in Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (Leviathan. 226pp; £10.00). Utterly accessible, Wright’s work is often what one might reasonably call “light verse” (so long as nothing pejorative is meant by the term) but his wit is not without its moments of real seriousness. This is very “English” writing, many of the poems occupying a landscape of pubs, cricket and London suburbs. It is entirely fitting that one of the many entertaining poems here should be a ‘Birthday Poem for Gavin Ewart’. Some of the poems here really need Wright performing them, but there are plenty in which Wright’s skill and verve will please most readers. Characteristically “English” in a different way is the work in Michael Tolkien’s Outstripping Gravity (Redbeck Press, 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford, BD9 4HH. 83pp; £7.95), quiet, poetry of rural life (mostly), of places and place-names, of family relationships and bird song, of death and faith (lost, as often as not). Without obvious emotional extremes, this is poetry of quiet intensity and assured craftsmanship, consistently thoughtful, often obliquely subversive of the very certainties the casual reader might take the work to be endorsing. The Praise of Swans (28pp; £3.50) by Gerry Cambridge (Shoestring Press, 19 Devonshire Avenue, Beeston, Nottingham, NG9 1BS) responds to the poet’s Scottish landscape with an eye attuned both to the cosmically large and the minutiae of the natural world. Cambridge is poet, photographer and naturalist (there are marvellous photographs in his “Nothing but Heather!”: Scottish Nature in Poems, Photographs and Prose (Luath Press, 543/2 Castlehill, The Royal Mile, Edinburgh, EH1 2ND. 119pp; £15.00). In The Praise there are poems full of freshly observed detail – (“The mist that crept in here and stayed / as summer hangs flecked apples up / has hung with microscopic drops and made / visible / webs in hundreds / of tiny money spiders / in the field below this room; / see, in the gloom / of dusk, the pewter, silent webs / in silence, unconcealed / by their clear fruit so delicately slung”); in Nothing but Heather there are more such poems as well as the photographs, and some excellently reflective autobiographical prose in the introduction.

   By the time you read this, Christmas will have come and gone. If none of these were under the tree, it’s not too late to treat yourself!