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

From the wizard of Ulverton, Thorpe’s first novel, you expect a refined control of diction and in this third collection it’s there in abundance. Thorpe’s at his best in the countryside (French, I imagine) where the large scope of his thought, announced by the title, is captured by language at once rich and fastidious. The four poems in ‘Tending The Stove’ I found the finest in the collection. They describe the forages for wood to heat the house through the four months of winter “most of the mornings of the world// are spent in this way” and perhaps the evenings: “How millennial old/ this altar, nurtured into embers// so high by evening we overheat... like a late, imperial dynasty/ dreaming in myth, it shuffles// its purple solely into ash...” .

     He’s at his best with a single focus like ‘Big Wheel’ and ‘Twitchers’ where he gives his wonderful Amy Clampitt exuberance its head: “When the Trumpets sound, drowning the guillemots,// when the souls rise like a billion fulmars/ discarding behind them the stink of cerements,// when even the dotterel has shrilled its last/ over the wrathful tussocks of Beinn Bhreac Mhor// He’ll be there with his binoculars and notebook/ spotting them...”.

     Without this focus, anecdotal clutter can lead his acute observations and linguistic facility into quirky poems with too many ideas pointing in different directions. This happens in some anecdotes like ‘Wild Camping In Sweden’ and ‘Playground Accident’ and ‘New Arrival’ all packed with wonderful lines but somehow overflowing the scope of the poem.

     The title sequence at the end of the collection I found slightly un-welcoming - I kept meeting small blocks of obscurity in what I recognised otherwise as splendid poetry; for example: “Only the tiger appals us more/ than our own intelligence. Even the thought/ of its big pelt shaking off snow// might bring one leaping through a clever brow”; ‘The funerary rites’: “there is something anxious/about the sheer quantity of petals// we threw upon the smell. I hope/ the change of climate will be taken by us all/ one day at a time...”. But these are small reservations about a collection with so much freshness and brilliance.