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

THE ZOO FATHER by Pascale Petit,
72pp, £6.95 Seren
LITHIUM by Emma-Jane Arkady,
56pp, £6.95 Arc Publications
SLATTERN by Kate Clanchy,
48pp, £7.99 Picador
STRIPTEASE by Susan Utting,
64pp, £6.95 Smith/Doorstop Books
THE GOOD WIFE by Georgia Scott, 62pp, Poetry Salzburg

Pascale Petit’s The Zoo Father is a unique volume. Like an Amazonian version of Ted Hughes’ animal poems we wait to see what spectrum of animals she can filter her feelings through and into. In ‘Self-Portrait with Fire Ants’, they represent the unknowable or unsayable, truth so potent it cannot be put into words. Written as a response to the re-appearance of her ailing, abusive, abandoning father and the passing of her mentally-ill mother (the subject of the ‘Vineyard’ section) these poems flow from Petit and their urgency is evident, not in anything slapdash – the poems are perfectly finished and structured – but in strength of expression. She sets out her stall in the first poem, by opening a case of forty bound hummingbirds and letting them fly about her sleeping father’s head.

Reality dissolves in ‘My Father’s Lungs’ in which she flies through ‘the skin of a sky’ into his chest:

However high I set the magnifier
I could not find excuses for you.
                      [‘Self Portrait as a Were Jaguar’]

As well as colour and vivid feelings and imagery, there is dark humour here; the only way she can say he is ‘cured’ is after his death and the macabre attention of head-hunters. It is shocking – and these poems exhibit shock – when, for all her transformative power, in the cold light of day she resorts to plain speech:

As I sit here holding your hand
knowing that you were once a rapist . . .
                                                    [‘My Father’s Body’]

Yet, despite its subject matter, watching Petit wrestle with forgiveness and acceptance in extremely trying circumstances creates work which flares up in its beauty and in its pain. In this alive verse, by facing her past, she commands it, turning the upside-downness of her life to advantage, assuming the role of ‘mother’ to her mother in ‘Reverse Vineyard’ and, containing a power rare in English writing, as if in preparation for reincarnation, laying her parents to rest.

Lithium is Emma-Jane Arkady’s first full-length collection, a fresh, poetic ‘faction’ based on her life. Having studied Geology and sedimentology, worked for engineering companies and been diagnosed as a manic depressive, her experiences are so varied and specialised that she creates her own sphere of references and characters. The grip on her environment, naming stones, trains, friends, trees, composers and roads, seems a way of keeping control. Several tones of voice are on display. The first poem, ‘Regenerated Bus Stop’, is combative, with coarse language in the second line and a brilliantly-sustained menace. Yet her negation is the result of the violent male gaze; busy mocking the Dolphin Centre – ‘good/for breaking heads on’ – we are as relieved as she is when the tense poem rushes to an end: ‘your Metro rounds the corner, / I breathe out the taste of the city’.

When manic she seems another person:

Lithium surprised me when it wasn’t there
and then she lifted barrels, hurled them
down the hill and caving Escort bonnets
screamed till the fall of mood came, vacant space,
took her in the dark, after the manic dark;
                                                                  [‘Precious Metal’].

She is aware of others’ opinion of her, noting that a friend is told to entertain and amuse her out of the way. Elsewhere, in the desperately sad ‘Andrea’s Last Shoulder Ride’, we gather she has lost possession of a child.

At times, like the fervent ‘Trainspotting’, in which she reclaims the phrase from Irvine Welsh, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She escapes the sexist and racist environment into the freedom of multiculture, eating fenugreek and entering classical music’s ‘close and secret world’. The section of poems centred around ‘Anna’ seem like a calmer alter-ego.

Arkady has the apparent gift of spontaneously capturing the world before her, sentences flowing relentlessly to an end twenty lines later. The lack of punctuation and apparent control in ‘Stunning’ is frightening and exhilarating. Yet for all their freedom of syntax, they are compressed. She is great at specifics; in ‘Four Weeks of Mania’ she ‘murders the moneyplant, upturns / the wheely bin’. This is an excellent first collection.

Kate Clanchy’s Slattern won several first book prizes on publication in 1996, and is now reprinted. Her poetry is well observed but with an ironic detachment, an authorial ‘of course’ hanging after every line. She catches people well and has a fine line in metaphor, especially in ‘The Wedding Guest’s Story’, but it sometimes seems as if everyone is a flautist, aerialist, husband or type. A little too governed by intellect for its own good, Slattern lacks spontaneity.

Striptease, Susan Utting’s first full-length collection is diffuse, inspired by paintings (‘The Arnolfini Marriage’), sculpture (Louise Bourgeois) and music, with quotes from Byron, Becket and Congreve occupying a page each.

Utting covers common territory with Kate Clanchy, including a section on childhood, best of which is ‘The Game’, even replicating a similar device – writing ‘England, Earth, The Universe’ after your name and address. She has a great gift for structuring a poem, often successfully achieving resolution in the very last line, making sense in an epiphany, a virtuoso skill. For all its variation, the volume lacks content.

Georgia Scott is the pseudonym of Cheryl Malcolm, assistant professor in the Department of American Studies and Literature at the University of Gdansk in Poland. After a few poems from her collection, The Good Wife, you are made so paranoid by the oppressive Polish regime that a poem about a waterfight, ‘Wet Morning’, has you jumpy and fearing the worst. For fans of terse reportage.