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

John Stammer’s first collection, Panoramic Lounge-Bar, could scarcely be more different in tone and intention from Matt Simpson’s affectionate black and white, or perhaps sepia, views of love, life and death in a specific working-class area. If not the provenance then the furnishings and strategies of Stammer’s poems seem to derive from the experience of other art-forms, notably cinema, painting, popular music and other writing. The only poem which, from its title, might lead the reader to expect something closer to Simpson territory, ‘My Great Grandfather’s Graveplate At Gestingthorpe’ turns out to be an elaborate and very skillfully developed lexical game ending with a pun on his own name.

     A poem of heartbreak, or at least disappointment in love, begins with references to and images from old movies, and a longer piece, ‘Certain Sundry Matters’, starts with cinematic images and subsequently throws direct or oblique glances at a sequence of films of the more or less distant past. Even the tender love poem, ‘Impression’, very appealing in its way, is like a scene from a movie, though it is marred by the shuddersomely awful lines “I feel I could fart in front of you/ and you would just say/ Silly boy, or something wonderful”. It wouldn’t be difficult to think of something more wonderful than “Silly boy”.

     This slackness over the use of banal and clichéd language spoils a few of the other poems; for instance, the wimpish “for my sins” appears without evident irony in the otherwise neatly turned ‘Perhaps You Have Dreams’, but generally the poems are vivid, inventive and enjoyable. ‘The Underlining of the Hemisphere’ is a finely judged poem of muted eroticism and ‘Aspects of Kees’ is a brilliant tour de force of clever and witty rhyming. Stammers is a seriously playful poet whose first volume is far more than merely promising, and it will be interesting to see in what direction his future work will go.