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

Charles Hadfield's poems explore the mysteries of the everyday. As he puts it in in Always ready to teach; always ready to learn

         Stop meddling about with novelty
stick to what
                    we never know for certain
     the here and now
           the unsettling everyday routines of
being here and now

As the title of his collection suggests, The Nothing that We Swim or Sink In, Hadfield is concerned with nothingness, not in a despairing way, but one which seems influenced by Buddhism, particularly in an insistence on attending to the present moment. His poem Thenever begins:

now.
here.
ever perfect.
boats wait. sun
on shoreline.

and ends

                   all. ever.
                   now.
                   here.

The title is typical of his linguistic inventiveness, punning on The Never and Then Ever to give that paradoxical sense of presence
and absence which runs through many of his poems and which everyday language is unable to evoke. Hence the need for poetry and Hadfield's play with words, as in Always ready to teach; always ready to learn, attempting to evoke the mystery of being

          ... wherever herenow theongoing the
para–
         usual, aesthetic or other, therehere,
ungo, blink of
         an eyelid, skim the surface, kind of,
seeming, clip
         the mindstream out of here and now,
the then.
         the think, a shotinthedarkofcourse
thing,
         saidnomorebutdeparted...

Awareness of the fullness of the present though must include awareness of the fullness of pain and, alongside their meditativeness, Hadfield's poems often evoke political violence. Always More to Learn begins as a marvellously funny poem, quoting foreign learners of English,

Yes, a tea junction, the place
for motorists to halt and take tiffin.

but ends chillingly,

        Jorge, from Chile, sitting right here in
our classroom, slowly pulls off his
         sweater,
           his shirt,
                       his vest.
We see the scars. The burn marks.
The class gapes, gasps.
Silence of complete understanding, his silence,
the hurt in his eyes.

Another poem, moves from

            the bear sits watching
the cold white disc
lift through mist.

to the wonderfully concise, political line, "There's a terror in flags. Their smug beauties,". Such transitions keep the reader alert and remind us of suffering and fatuity. The last word of the last poem in the volume however is 'hope', and for me these poems express a faith in the basic meaningfulness of things, something language cannot grasp but poetry can hint at. These are certainly poems that deserve
to be read and re–read.

Like Hadfield, James Cole's From the Blue is much concerned with nature, but it lacks any of his linguistic and poetic inventiveness,
being very much in the English walk– in–the–country–wistful line which seems to me exhausted, and was with the Georgians. Many of the frequent similes are either clichéd or unconvincing. In Age, for example, "trees stand as old and still as time"
while "rivers and streams... pour like catharsis". The language is often flat, eg in April

the heating goes off, curtains drawn
the view into the distance lightens
as we open our windows and the
weather changes
after days of rain we walk through woods

Poets have to renew the language in some way. Hadfield does. Cole doesn't.