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

Redbeck Press, 24 Aireville Road, Frizinghall, Bradford BD9 4HH 52 pages £6.95

Bill Petty, who lives in Kent, has a wealth of experience, has been
published since the 1950s and is still churning out thought-provoking
work. I think he’s best when he creates an atmosphere, usually in short poems that suggest far more than they tell. One of the best here, is 'Shop', with its intriguing, mysterious opening. It is possible you do not know it,/the ancient shop that, when you enter it,/ is empty of customers and stock./Or so it seems: there is a sense of movement/ somewhere, somehow./ It is, I think, North of the river. It’s a poem in a voice that gradually becomes more staid, affected, cautious - and it’s a poem about caution, about risk. Similarly, the last poem in the collection, 'Van', which takes off after a beginning that overdoes the adjectives in describing the van. Variously, we learn it is silent, gigantic, vast, long, inviting... but when the drama begins, with the atmosphere of a recurring dream, the narrator gets into the empty, presumably parked, van. Why? Not sure, but as he does I could feel the weight of his past, present and future stepping in with him. The title poem is an odd, only partly successful treatment of a plane hi-jack over Taipei Airport where the narrator blocks out what is happening by reading ‘neutral Jane’. The best lines are those that are flat and observational in tone. Two Chinese played cash-cards: one made a gain. The ending, the perception that ‘surrender and no deaths’ represented an anti-climax that eventually found its way into a poem was an interesting take, but I’m not sure that it captured either the drama or, entirely, the removed nature of the narrator, which in itself should have been more interesting.