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

I have to take on trust the statement on the cover that this poet is the first Welsh poet in 1500 years to “make a serious attempt to have her work known outside Wales” but I find it very surprising. It led me to the more important question of the translation of these poems. A team of five translated them and she pays high tribute to their work. However, since she’s clearly bi-lingual, I wondered she didn’t feel she wanted to translate them herself. Whatever the reasoning behind it she says very little about the work of translating Welsh poetry into English or how the contribution was richer in trusting the work to others. Because I don’t know Welsh (I wish I did) I was often struck by some rather abrupt punctuation that looked identical in the Welsh and wondered if punctuation reflects the different structures of Welsh. In a word I felt there was a lot here that could have been illuminating as a preface.

     This is exuberant poetry:

Let me praise May in stockinged feet,
bow before her with a psalm.
In the front room a widowed seamstress
would turn silk-paper into dresses. From the
                     tideline of underarm to breast,
my breath held in case of a pinch, were the
                                    hidden, innocent pins.
And me the flibbertygibbet,
foolery above bare legs...

An appealing quality particularly when the poem moves sufficiently to use its power. The downside - as so often - is the over-burdening of slight subject matter in what would otherwise be a splendid poem, as in her ‘Harlem, Night’, full of drama yes, but it’s a slight let-down to know it is after all only a taxi ride with a Chicano driver. But in simple poems like ‘Farmhand’ exuberance turns into a compelling warmth.

     She’s travelled a lot and there are poems from America and Asia but Wales is there too - in weather and landscape and also (in my stereotyped version of it) in church, (‘Wandering’) in the parlour, (‘Closed Curtains’) homely wisdom, (‘The Crinoline Tree’), folk humour, (‘Cat Out Of Hell’) and sometimes a slightly tacky prurience in (‘February 15th’) and a curious obsession with lingerie (‘Nothing But Curves’). At the beginning there’s another quality too - a faintly old-fashioned, mandarin quality of setting out a poetic disquisition on some theme: ‘The Red Heart’ or ‘Couplings’ or ‘Love Scales’. Nothing wrong with that except it reads like “poetic work” where, in this epoch, we’re accustomed to coming upon our themes in poetry more casually.