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

Picador, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR 45 pages £7.99

For a couple of years Jacob Polley has been celebrated as one of the bright young things of British poetry. Consequently, I’ve been looking forward to his work. The fi rst disappointment was at this year’s Ledbury Festival, when he gave a boring, complacent reading that went nowhere very slowly. OK, so he can’t read his stuff. That’s not a hanging offence...so we come to The Brink, which of course is a Poetry Book Society Choice because once the critical super-structure gives its collective thumbs up, then you’re in... and again I was horribly disappointed. I just don’t think this man is ready for a collection. The bulk of the material is weak. It lacks stance, has a self-satisfied air, a so-what feel. For example, the entire poem Economics: My father at the sink/like his father before
him/ softening two flints/ of soap, then squeezing/ the yellow into the pink. Good grief... Further on, The Irish Sea begins with an evocative image: If ever a sea was going nowhere/ rolling back on itself, and then is ruined by the inappropriate its handbrake off, then switching immediately then switching immediately off
from the car image to some kind of foot-slog running itself ragged... and and ragged meanders off into word play that ends grimly: A little sad reflection and you’re there,/ the end of the line, the long haul hauled/ to the brink, the drink, from Paul back to Saul. The introduction of the Biblical reference
at the end, for no good reason except the sound, completed my irritation. There are good poems here. I thought Allhallows was an outstanding piece of writing: Morning breaks like an egg/ on a promise, and the gulls/fall about laughing... and again: You’ve held a torch beneath your chin/and your face has stuttered/ through your hidden selves/ on its cylinder of bone. However, the overall feeling is of a poet being celebrated before his time. I hope it’s not the ruining of him. And that he learns to shrug off the
considered diffidence that was my abiding memory of his reading.