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

The first poem in this selection, ‘Sergei di Diaghileff (1929)’ establishes a very particular world to which the poet speaks. Among these connoisseurs you feel like you do at a party where you don’t know anybody - you try to smile and look knowing:

‘Je suis le spectre...’ Gautier now. But what gold
Paved Peters town! U skated, plump and
                                                              suave.
Composition does not become me, since
                                                Rimsky insists.
Why not compose my friends? Mutely,
                                      imported aqauarelles
Ognote the Stieglitz. That was before I
                                                           invented
The avant-garde. ‘Mir Isskoustva’... or some
                                                   such aesthetic
Lab. Test-tubes to bung up Fokine, Benois
                                                   (Poor souls)...

and so on.

     Probably it’s not possible to meditate on some personage without excluding the wider world. However this sense of speaking to a particular audience continues in other poems - an audience the poet has to please and amuse and to whom he must be original. This gives much of the poetry an anxious, restless, edgy quality. Take the poem ‘Ridge above Ridge’ (from Lyrics from Imruil):

Paws to yourself, please. What’s so clever
In going on your belly beneath the goatskins,
Nosing for goods the ostrich buried?
I’ll carry the lamp: when were dazzled?
You make the blunders, but who takes the risk?

The choice of perspective, the stance, the abrupt shifts of diction characterise many other poems too. Then there’s another barrier: a pursuit of detail that leads you far from the poem’s highway and destination; Boxing the Cleveland (a long poem about boxing a horse) is one such poem:

The lorry’s box is partitioned for at least
Four horses standing sideways in their stalls:
Its width permits a squeezing space at best.
Between its sides and the nettle-bordered walls
Hard by the lane, where it’s brought to a
                                             shuddering stop
Beside the gate pushed back against the shed
Serving as laundry. Someone thin on top
Comes out of the house and greets with nod of
                                                              head.

It’s a pity because that poem, written fluently and elegantly in ballad quatrains, like many other poems, illustrates the poet’s great versatility, observation and involvement in his subject. Other barriers are the remote stance in certain poems of reflection, like ‘Love Poem’ or ‘The Quest’ and the forcing of rhyming schemes in, for example, ‘The Ballad of the Sands’:

He drove on his own
Dazzled by the sun,
And his steering gave a groan
At each slow turn
- Groaned as in pain.
Back in town again:

I felt most at ease with, indeed really enjoyed, those poems where he dedicates himself to landscape, as in ‘Privity’ and in the long poems set in Australia for example. Here are the last two stanzas from the wonderful poem ‘Idea of the South’:

Prairies prohibited by cliff-walls, reservoirs of
                                                          silence,
manifestations of elemental powers, torrents
Of specific energies, nights of masonic
                                                          symbol.
This is the refuge of the Sacred Ibis.

Last moment footage fades the departure
                                                           lounge
into a wind-wheel fanned by the sunset,
Blurring its vanes in a land neither dead nor
                                                            alive
on a planet half dazzle, half drizzle and
                                                       twilight.

     It feels to me that when he’s taken over by his vision and feels less need for particular reader approval, his gifts manifest themselves splendidly.