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

Like her cave-divers Pauline Stainer comes “softly into the underground chamber”, “working by touch alone”. And eerie footfalls might well be heard. You lift the lid of ‘The Green Harpsichord’ and see “gilded flowers/ and song birds/ in an open grave”. The energy of the dead catches the light “like salt on the lips”.

     The stone-age wielders of flints may be dead but are not gone. The world is one body.

...but I still see her -
the dancer
with the antler head-dress,
binding her breasts
at the burial
of a stillborn child
to stop the milk rising.

     The poems invite you to share a meditative listening to silence. “The poetry is not firstly in the words”. They are “prayer without words”, jottings heard in the quietness, or auguries noticed in the waverings of Orkney weather.

     The spaces and silences between images are like the first unprinted snow or “a Japanese ricepaper painting”. They can make the poems puzzling. It’s montage: images are juxtaposed, the reader must connect them, and the leaps between can be great, as in ‘The Flight of Icarus’:

Paint him
with raised brush-strokes
impasto -
all the big cats
kill with a neckbite.

     The whole notion can be a riddle, as in ‘The Puppet Master’:

He is perfectly visible
in his black cloak

They say that after a while
you cease to notice him,
even though, like any puppeteer
he can kill
and bring to life again.

But it is not so.
Only when music plays
and he no longer speaks my lines
do I allow myself
to be dreamed.

It’s easy to ‘solve’ this as ‘God’, but the last detail requires a little time, imagination and philosophy.

     It’s difficult to review this poetry because each poem invites you to spend a pleasurable day revisiting it and listening to the rustlings in the silent hedges. Naturally some poems go deeper than others, but there are no duds, and all this is an attempt to say that this is a poet in the proper now rare sense of the word.