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

Marge Piercy, Stone, Paper, Knife, Pandora Press, £3.95

Stone, Paper, Knife, scorns the narcotic power of unchallenged familiarity: 'In repetition, a sense of identity/Lulls...' The political efficacy of the poems depends on Marge Piercy's ability to subvert straightforward confessional narrative into a revelation of the constructed and imposed sameness that constitutes banal experience. In this she fails. Ironically the feminist can only survive on 'the mud flats of language' by an expressive restatement (or over-statement) of her position, in itself repetitious: 'To survive saying, to say again/and again ...' Piercy rarely stops at twice. The blubbering metaphors of 'Mrs. Frankenstein's Diary' go into sententious overdrive, spilling out Christmas cracker mottoes of feminism. The poetic image is untrustworthy here, and is perpetually fractured by an explicitness passed off as realism: 'Only/my pain which is actually anger is real.' In the Marshes of Blood River' plumbs a supposed depth beneath the disfiguring ease of male imagery, substituting cathartic contortions for the numbing opacity of acceptance: `Ease means the impulse blurs into the act/in one arc, with blithe unawareness.' The redundancy of Piercy's project is clearest in the third verse sequence, 'Digging In', the poetry of expressive renewal. Romantic clichés of vegetative growth and natural unity combine to restore poetic metaphor, now naively treated as a form of imaginative release, wholly independent of constraint, a counter to real oppression. The reactionary use of 'poetry' as an area of unbridled freedom or idyllic retreat only serves to compound the lack of self-consciousness which turns this collection into the dampest of polemical squibs.