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

There is a kind of poetry that nudges at things rather than confronts them directly and which sometimes eases slowly into the reader’s mind. You have to adapt to its way of looking at the world:

A man throws pebbles down from on top of a
                                                             house
We will look at some photographs to see what
                                                              exists
He has seen how things can twist in
                                        unthinkable shapes
She has learnt how colours bend and loom
                                          next to each other

It’s not immediately striking in the sense of setting up some sort of dramatic scene, but it is intriguing and that, I think, takes the place of the drama. The reader is drawn in not by an immediately identifiable social situation which may be resolved or explained as the poem progresses, but instead by a curiosity about what are a series of seemingly linked statements which may have as much to do with the poet’s mind as with anything concrete in the observable world. The example of surrealism is not far away and though its influence is felt in many of the poems it does not dominate them. It’s an absorbed factor rather than something knowingly grafted on to the writing in an attempt to give it a greater sophistication.

     Mackie moves confidently in and out of poetry and prose, with prose poems and short short-stories placed strategically around his book, and his style is fluent and clean. The work may be deep but it is never muddied by clumsy writing. And I was always struck by how Mackie can paint pictures with a few, well-chosen words:

It settles down: darkness sinks on the soft walls:
a motel room in western Massachusetts,

which cars shone past on the highway all day,
outside, where the day’s wet heat still loiters:

     This is quiet poetry but a reader taking up the challenges presented by the poet will be rewarded by its carefully provocative explorations of language and mood.