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

Selima Hill is well known for her acerbic, left of field tone of voice. These are low-slung cryptic messages, coming from a long way off and I found them hard to register at first. Many of the poems are very short, a fragment of thought or an unexpected image seemingly thrown down for the reader to take or leave. Turning to the blurb at the back for help, I found the poems were located in “the haunted house of adolescence”, and I was glad of the tip, for it enabled me to inhabit the mood of the book. I began to find much original and evocative imagery contained within the (maddeningly) short verses:

A row of shoes,
a man in silk pyjamas,

unsettle,
like a necklace dipped in dust,

an absent father,
and the father’s house.

     There are recurring allusions to the 1950s through a deadpan collage of hallways, bathrooms and staircases, rose patterned china, pyjama cases and angora boleros. One of the best is a poem called ‘Plums’, which reminded me of the Carlos Williams’ poem ‘This is just to say’, about the cold plums in the ice box:

Like drifts
of soft angora boleros

on little girls
who won’t be girls for long,

the heavy plums’
faint dusting of white bloom

intensifies the blue
of their purple.

     There is an ominous figure of a lodger that haunts these poems without ever becoming clear, a male figure of violence that lurks at the edge of the picture, as in ‘Lips’, which I quote in full:

She carries them discreetly
past the lodger

who crams them down her throat
like broken glass.

     After eleven short poems there is a longer poem called ‘PRAWNS DE JO’, which seems to be a distracted kind of incantation from a guilt ridden girl who perhaps set fire to her baby by mistake. The macabre images of the poem are harrowing, “the smell of the singeing baby” and how she would “part the veil of flies to please the doctors”.

     ‘Bulls’ is a very interesting poem, it contains much and is complete. Evocative and witty, it describes the loneliness of a teenage bedroom and the loneliness of a teenage mind, with controlled exactitude.

     These are uncomfortable poems about the loneliness of growing up. There is a yearning for, and an absence of, home in the work.