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What I want from a poem by Roselle Angwin
A5, from author, PO Box 17, Yelverton, Devon, PL20 6YF,
www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk, £4.00.

It is five (un-numbered) pages before Roselle Angwin finally reaches this question. In those pages, she asks first what poetry is for, as though it has more reason to be justified than everything else, which it hasn’t. This section is, frankly, overdone, eventually disappearing into a ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ - ‘For me, poetry will sometimes take me to a threshold and give me a glimpse of - something. Something other, something not entirely knowable. Mystery. If I’m lucky it may even fly me over that threshold...’ Personally, I’m with Auden - ‘...it survives / in the valley of its making where executives / would never want to tamper...’ - In Memory of W.B.Yeats.

   Next comes an examination of how poetry works, which rightly focusses on its appeal to the ear and its affinity to song, its strongest claim over against prose. This is a true poet talking here. This section is excellent, and manages to keep its hooves in the mire, though not without one attempt at breaking out - ‘... a poem , like a symbol, gives itself up gradually, but a reader neeeds to have enough of a glimpse through the doorway to be beguiled into wanting to push the door open...’

   So to ‘what I want from a poem’. Which is? What all good poets and good readers want...and a little more - ‘I want to wear it like a skin. I may not die from the lack of it in my life, but having met it I also know, like Adrienne Rich, that it’s a means of saving your life’

   The bonus section is her own poetry criteria, a terrifying list of 19 that might tempt you either to despair or completely ignore them. It is difficult to argue with any of them, and you have to respect Roselle Angwin’s Directorship of the Fire in the Head creative writing programme. However, having slogged through the other 18, her injunction to ‘cut, cut, cut’ might make you feel that you were being asked to throw the potato out with the peelings.