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

This 'alternative generation' of poets, in being set beside the Next Generation selected last year, must justify the nature of its difference. I admit, when I started the project, I imagined I might find several new poets who would stand out as striking new voices, with a striking new aesthetic, a style, or an ideology of their own. In reading through the collections submitted by editors, I was instead struck by how many of the names were familiar and by how predictable much of the output was.

There is a risk that those selected here are not very different from the Next Generation poets, but rather from their peers in the ranks of the small press writers. The five names I've chosen are to some extent the same as those publishing in the mainstream in that I can imagine each of them finding a home, eventually, with a larger publishing house. They have a similar ambition and reach. Perhaps this is cheating. But the good news is that amid the hacks and stalwarts of the small press output there are poets who...well, there are poets.

It does raise many issues about the role of the small presses and the value they offer, differently, to readers and to writers. There is no doubt the small presses pick up some of the overspill from the larger presses and this would seem to be their first and most natural activity. There are also a few presses which do offer a narrow, but specialist, school of writers (usually the 'experimental' type); there are established writers on holiday, for whatever reason, from bigger publishing houses; outsider presses and outsider writers; limited editions and limiting editions. Gems and detritus.

Of the gems, I picked Josephine Dickinson, Mary Michaels, Joseph Woods, Geoff Hattersley and Helen Macdonald. I had also originally picked John Kinsella but his title was later disqualified on the grounds that it was a pamphlet, rather than a full-length collection. As a group, the writers don't share many similarities. I have picked only five because if I had extended my list to ten, it could have been twenty. The five discussed here represent my most confident choices.

Josephine Dickinson (Scarberry Hill: Rialto) combines both strength and delicacy in poems which take an unflinching look at the harsh environment of the North Pennines. Some of her work centres on her experience of her own deafness, and on her marriage to man some forty years her senior and the love poems in this book are deeply affecting. This is a first collection of considerable depth and breadth, and Dickinson has now produced a second collection with Flambard. There are many poems to admire in Scarberry Hill, notably Dinner for One; Let Him Keep Who Can; Maybe This Kind of Love; Eight Treasures; and The Lambs Were Still Running With the Ewes.

The poem Henry Miller in Constable Country serves in many ways as a counterpoint to the major themes in the book. Concerned largely with the natural world and with her work on a hill farm, Dickinson's commentary in this poem is on the urban, suburban and/or tamed environments with their tamed beasts

Blocks and blocks of cosy semis,
miles and miles of cats and dogs,
canaries, budgies, hamsters rot inside
this animal heat-belt, city suspender-belt.'

This voice contrasts powerfully and effectively with the more complex voice used for her familiar world, where, in spite of the harsh realities of the hill farm and the bleakness of the fells, her tone adopts a greater levity. It is interesting to note that her language in this poem becomes literally more concrete as she enters the urban depths. The style here is also of a more condensed, almost claustrophobic diction. There is less air.

This is an outstanding collection and one which would merit inclusion in ny selection of new voices. It was an easy and immediate choice.

Joseph Woods (Sailing to Hokkaido: Worple) arrives on this list with many accomplishments – a Patrick Kavanagh Award for Best First Collection, an MA in Creative Writing, and the directorship of Poetry Ireland.

In direct contrast to Dickinson, Woods' tone is distant, yet his writing has a striking grace and poise. The poems here describe his travels in Asia and often turn on a single thought or moment. He is difficult to quote from because of this. In Interview he writes

I was made to wait, and the mind
idles over distance. Somewhere

A Chaos-butterfly is flapping
its wings. I have no ear

For diminutive beats, and this tremble
is perceptible to the eye only

and it seems this serves as a good introduction to Woods' poetics. At once spartan and yet strangely rich, Woods' approach is deceptively simple. His poetry is very visual and he conveys accurately the traveller's or stranger's sensibility; his eye seems to seek out and isolate the strange and the familiar, without ever quite owning the places and objects he describes. What makes this book unusual is that Woods overcomes the problems of writing about an unfamiliar place by placing himself nowhere, adrift, and almost weightless.

I have chosen the poem Kunda Beach because it achieves the kind of rich simplicity at which he excels. This is a contemplative poetry lost in a daydream, and a pure pleasure to read.

Geoff Hattersley (Harmonica: Wrecking Ball) is justifiably enjoying a long career and is often described as having something of a cult following. I've been reading his work for the better part of twenty years and he still seems as compelling as he did back then. He has previously published with Bloodaxe, but this collection comes from the stylish and contemporary Wrecking Ball.

So Hattersley is no 'new' voice, no surprise find, but his work retains the vigour, humour and enthusiasm of a poet at a much earlier stage. Often labelled as 'northern', 'working class' or even simply 'Huddersfield', Hattersley's work does share a characteristic surface immediacy with many of the others of that ilk. However, there is a real danger that an inattentive reader will miss some of the twists and challenges he presents.

The poem A Terrible Song, for example, has wrong-footed the reader three times by the end of the first line:

A Terrible Song

was just starting. I switched it off.

Having first responded to the pathos of the title, the reader immediately realises the poet means a really crap song on the radio and, having switched tack, Hattersley abruptly destroys the established narrative. That's a lot of action in ten words.

The rest of the poem then does lead the reader back into the ordinary pathos of the everyday, but Hattersley delivers real tragedy by introducing the image of flowers left at the scene of an accident, and his own inability to respond adequately. It is a complex and reflexive poem on many levels, exploring the ambivalence between feeling and knowing in the face of our ordinary miseries. Crucially, Hattersley manages to critique flippancy and self pity without descending into either. I can't think of many poets who can take that kind of risk and pull it off.

Overall, Hattersley is the kind of writer who lends the small presses their credibility: they need poets like him to entice the book-buying public, and Wrecking Ball have made a suitably excellent job of presenting his work here.

Helen Macdonald (Shaler's Fish: etruscan Press) This book has already been described elsewhere as 'a modern classic' and has been widely reviewed here and in the States. Macdonald's work is unlikely to appeal to the general readership mentioned above; her poetry is difficult and demanding, and all the more essential for that.

In Taxonomy, Macdonald shows herself to be the kind of writer for whom thought and action are inseparable. The poem draws an almost continuous, sinuous line of intellectual and observational enquiry which in many ways sets out her terms of engagement for the reader. She begins

Wren. Full song. No subsong. Call of alarm, spreketh and ought
damage the eyes with its form, small body, tail pricked up &
                                                                             beak like a hair
trailed through briars [...]

which is simply provocative and wonderful. She ends

a spark that meets the idea of itself, apparently fearless.
Ah cruelty. And I had not stopped to think upon it
& I had not extended it into the world for love for naught.

This is a poet engaged in serious play, who deserves to be much more widely read. The current territories staked out within mainstream publishing appear not to accommodate this type of experimental writing.

Mary Michaels (The Shape of the Rock: Sea Cow) offers something altogether more comfortable in both style and subject matter, and probably represents the solid centre of UK small press poetry. This volume contains a selection of earlier works along with a number of new poems, and it is impressive that Michaels is prepared to take more risks with the later poems than with the earlier work; she is without doubt a poet of some technical skill. She is also a poet who displays a subtle edginess.

In Learning from History Michaels describes a political demonstration and evokes the paranoia and helplessness which such an event can produce – and this poem will be very powerful for those who remember the endless demonstrations of the Thatcher years, but it also gains a new relevance with the recent protests over the Iraq war.

How many times have we done this?

Stepped from the grey streets into green open space
at the north east gate, tight with anxiety
screwing up our eyes for the lorry with the microphone
or banners we can recognize, past clusters of police?

Michaels' style is direct and accessible and these are well made narrative poems. Many of them are surprisingly dark (Journey and Pushed for example) and it is this quality which most engages the reader.

The Shape of the Rock contains the kind of work which endures and which many who aspire to small press publication would do well to read.