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

Dennis O’Driscoll, New and Selected Poems, £11.95
Anvil Press, Neptune House, 70 Royal Hill, London SE10 8RF
Elizabeth Smithers, A Question of Gravity,
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, OL14 6DA
Brian Bartlett, Wanting the Day, £9.00
Peterloo Poets, The Old Chapel, Sand Lane, Calstock, Cornwall PL18 9QX
Eva Salzman, A Double Crossing, £8.95
Bloodaxe, High Green, Tarest, Northumberland, NE48 IRP
Debjani Chatterjee, Namaskar, £8.95
Rdbeck Press, 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford BD9 4HH

Anthologists change canons. Experts like Sean O’Brien (The
Deregulated Muse (Bloodaxe 1997)) have shown how mid-twentieth century editors tried to establish Movement, Apocalyptic or Martian as the ‘New’ or ‘Contemporary’ poetry, or how Larkin’s 1973 Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, stuffed with old school warhorses (more Hardy than Yeats, more Housman than Hughes), shifted the paradigm towards a more buttoned style, not least by calling it ‘Verse’. Selectors do the same. The Pound in my pocket was a Faber put together in 1928, so for me Pound is the recreator of Languedoc and Cathay, not the perplexing poet of the Cantos. Admiring (but maybe axe‑grinding) editors or Audens revising their younger selves make partisan selections from a career’s work. But they do expose features such as a poet’s life, consistency,
development, or a pervading undertheme.

These selections tell us little about how they were made or even who by, though Eva Salzman tells us the occasions for some poems, dates of first appearances, and which are new and slotted in, but not on what principle some have been ‘re‑homed, ‘regrouped’ and re‑headed. how do poets or editors select? Do they consider the effect of which poem they put first? (I was so seduced by Lowell’s ‘Quaker Graveyard’ heading the 1965 Faber selection that I never got beyond it.) Dennis O’Driscoll wrote about making his selection, in this winter’s Poetry News. He now agrees with critics of once‑cherished poems; some poems refuse to go away;
anthologists ask for poems which he has discarded; early poems,
with foundations laid down, are unsusceptible to refurbishment;
bringing together poems from different periods reveals recurrences
and inconsistencies.

Dennis O’Driscoll’s is the biggest collection here: in Poetry News he says he needs ‘the ground cover as well as the trees’. His selection is the one most like an implicit Life. Not just his Life, but Life itself, referred to in many lines and titles (‘Way of Life’, ‘Taking Life’, ‘Love Life’, ‘Life’, ‘Seven Ages’). Life is also continually evoked by its necessary converse, and deaths recalled, reported, and anticipated pervade the selection, starting with the first four poems. The first is a sort of list: ‘Someone’

   …is dressing up for death today…
   ...
   someone is making rash promises to friends
   someone’s coffin is being sanded…

   It’s a simple form which he uses very cleverly: later there’s a
brilliant and chilling ‘What She Does Not Know Is’ ‘That she is a
widow./ … / That it is not his car she will soon hear slowing down
outside.’ Even on a site for new houses he notes that ‘our baths end up as drinking troughs’ (‘Home Affairs’), and a tall ‘tree’ rising from the shady ‘ground cover’ of his oeuvre is ‘Bottom Line’, fifty virtuoso eleven‑liners detailing the anxieties, miseries and hypocrisies of upwardly mobile office life. in more recent work he relaxes into loquacious but witty jeremiads against modern society, as if he is auditioning for Grumpy Old Poet. But though O’Driscoll sees the skull beneath the skin, he is also an affectionate poet, often funny (‘Porlock’ begins ‘This is the best poem I have never written’), and he has also become more generous with picturesque detail and more lavish with imagery, such as the ‘white blood of the snowman,/ the burst main flooding/ from Christ’s side.’ (‘Water’). He describes Australia as having got the day over, ‘eaten the fruit of knowledge’, and harvested its accident statistics while we are still ‘in the dark’ with ‘hours to kill’ (‘Tomorrow’). A ‘Life Story’ about a woman on a bus reading a book (called ‘Life’) ends

   Is she dying to know
   the kind of ending it will have?
   The book slams unexpectedly.

   She gets off at the next stop.

In contrast, Elizabeth Smithers’ ‘a woman on a bus reading a
poem’ is the occasion of cheery images of the reader’s heroic
enterprise (it is a long poem that the short poem is about). elizabeth
smithers is the best example here of consistency over time. her
selection starts as it goes on, delightfully. over a hundred poems
playfully celebrate fleeting encounters, sights, insights and insouciant
details of her life in new Zealand, wide‑eyed trips to the states and
the uK, and the friends, paintings, music, reading, and wonderful
new words she meets. they transmute what they describe: rain
is ‘an unwrapped gift’ (‘Hearing the approach of rain’), an ill‑sown
indentation on an otherwise ‘skinhead’ field is a ‘love‑bite’ (‘Stubble
Fields’). She finds the remarkable even at a funeral (‘A Cortege of
Daughters’). The poems (over a third in triplets) look good on the
page (though rather overcrowded in this volume) and can exploit
formal organisation and devices, like the double comparison in:

   Death to her blond hair is stone to hair
   but air sustains and stone can melt . .
                                  (‘Margo lecturing on death’)

But for all that formality, her poems reward reading aloud:

   From a panoramic window‑seat
   overlooking scores of streets i watch
   the distant walking of white feet.
                                 (‘A man walking in white shoes’)

   The glimpse, the odd detail and, three and four triplets later,
those ‘minims on stave‑like legs’ provoking a thought about visual
effects are all typical. such lowfalutin poems make the mundane
seem wonderful. to share her entranced eye and imagination is
life‑enhancing.

Canadian Brian Bartlett’s selection is the one which most illustrates
development. By 2002 he is writing

   So slowly has he crept into middle age
   he can’t pinpoint when the parties of his youth
   became distant and dreamlike, reflection
   on rain‑smeared windows…
`                             (‘After the Age of Parties’)

   But the chronological sequence begins, after a mysteryspeak
epigraph by Annie Dillard, with a poem which ends:

   in morning’s bright haze we see
   secondhand     we see
   the dozen dances
   but not the dancers:
   not the water‑striders
   but water‑strider shadows
   flick and sway
   across the clear underwater sand
               (‘This Bridge is No Bridge’)

   A fine observation, but made with an obscurity and length at odds with the trick of light it describes. here, as when he takes 52 lines for ‘Kissing in the Carwash’, his work contrasts with Elizabeth Smithers’ lighter touch with such apercus. The first half of the book
(and of his published career) has many subjects and settings in
Canadian and Japanese landscape, such as four on mountains which
end and begin his 1989 and 1993 sections here. as the selection
proceeds, however, the subject‑matter diversifies and the language
gets both easier and more economical:

   …when wind
   knocked a blind’s cord against a sill, a jay
   shrieked in the garden. Ten seconds or so of waking,
   then sleep pulled me back down by both legs.
                              (‘A Sliver of Dawn’)

and the second half begins with six deftly conceived and perfectly
told Tales in verse.

Eva Salzman has an epigraph which could serve to justify poetry
collections, Sophocles’ ‘One must wait until evening to see how
splendid the day has been’. Her verse is as dazzlingly various as
her CV (in which ‘Exercise Director of a Brooklyn orthodox Jewish
diet centre’ is only typical). She has Blues, a litany, three separated
variations of a poem on ‘twins’, poems so sparse as to be almost
projective or imagist: ‘Coloured parasols/charred by an evening
drizzle. // Black mushrooms, nightmare‑grown./ …’ (‘Umbrellas
along a Canal’), and her special gift is to write in the informal
language of speech and the rhythms of lyrics (many commissioned
as such) yet often still within formal structures such as sonnets.
The pyrotechnic profusion of surprising words and changing tones
bounce you through poems which are often hard to understand first
time, even a high‑spirited shaggy‑dog riff like ‘The Lost Mushrooms
of Bologna’! The sequence challenged me. Most of the new poems
come at the beginning, so the poems at the end are not her latest
(but neither are they her earliest). The earliest in time are the most immediately satisfying: ‘Cross out’, with its three quatrains of
memories of an American adolescence capped by a neat rhymed
ending, accords with my oldest preconceptions about what poems
are, and it might have helped me to cope with the exhilarations of later poems if I’d worked my way towards them through the
progressive loosening of her styles. Not that her earlier poems are merely conventional verse. there is power, wit and critical comment in

   The budgie chirps ‘goodness’ to thin air
   while Bach quivers slightly and the fat roast

   sways in the oven, brain‑dead, but chuckling
   in its oil…
                              (‘The English Earthquake’)
and

   …in warm weather
   they sell sulphur from the wells for your pleasure.
   Good health! November and the Guy will burn.
   What leaves are left on what trees are left to turn.
                               (‘Ending up in Kent’)

But it is a different sort of power and wit from that of a new poem
on the conveniently diminishing size of the girls with whom a
presumed former lover replaced the speaker:

   Ah, they were Perfection itself, tickling
   his palm, fluttering so delicately,
   except there were no wings of course.
                                 (‘A Pint’)

   Eva Salzman is the poet here for whom a collection reveals and
develops a recurring, if not persistent, theme. a section on ‘twins
and songs’, and poems about the twin Buddhas of Bamiyan and a
‘doppelganger’, explore the peculiar (and her own) experience of
being a twin, announced by the title and the admirable Jane Lewis’s
shocking cover which I had to put under wraps around the house
and keep off public transport.

None of these poets are English, originally, but Debjani Chatterjee, like Eva Salzman, has settled here, and her collection is a kaleidoscope of settings, topics, and references from a variety of
cultures. there are poems (annotated) about India and its Gods,
characters, politicians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and
Parsees, but also cross‑cultural poems which you suspect only she
can write, like the poem quoted below or one on offering, in a sari,
a public kiss to a man not her husband. Her forms and subjects
range from haiku and a Lilliputian postcard, through villanelles, an
EFL poem and a found poem, to long dramatic monologues in
personae which include a snake, Cromwell’s wife and Lucrezia
Borgia’s mirror, and retold fairy tales and personal anecdotes and
reminiscences like that of the excellent rebellion of a fellow‑pupil in
an English Elocution class for Indian girls (‘Tongues and Amazons’). I specially enjoyed the title poem, a long‑lined greeting to the unlikely
hero of both her contrasted and lovingly described grandfathers –
Sir Walter Scott. Her profligacy and energy are not easily conveyed
by short quotation, and her quality lies more in the invigorating
effect of whole poems and the whole selection, rather than in
particular well‑chosen or –honed phrases, lines or stanzas. So here
is her ‘An “Indian Summer”’ – whole, distinctive and illuminating:

   September – and I see the urban fisher‑folk
   dreaming of salmon leaping in roaring rivers.
   Sunday in Sheffield – and I walk by the canal.
   The high himalayas drum with roaring rivers.
   The dragonfly flits in the Yorkshire afternoon
   while Mandakini descends in roaring waters.
   Once a laughing goddess roamed along these banks;
   now unknown, her name resounds through roaring waters.
   Ducks swim, ruffling their feathers over this landscape.
   Yards away, industry storms its roaring waters.
   Whatever she is called, Ganga meditates
   On summer rippling the calm of English rivers.

When I said that selectors can skew the evidence, I should have
added that reviewers can further skew it by what the poems they
choose to quote, cite or praise in their reviews. So beware of my
taste and whims, and read these selections for yourself: all are well
worth it.