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

Pauline Plummer’s poems have a pleasant anecdotal quality which makes them very easy to read. They often start off with direct statements and proceed to little reflections on life:

I was afraid of uncles
with laughs like football crowds,
wearing bark coloured clothes,
taking up more space than allowed.

It’s a comfortable way of writing and draws pictures of an oil-rig worker, at home with plenty of money, dressed in ‘designer immaculate clothes’, and an elderly woman at a tea dance, ‘in her fifties make up/ roots like early snowdrops/ passing for sixty.’ It’s easy to recognise the types and it gives the poems an immediacy and intimacy which is attractive. In a fine, long poem about her father, Plummer has him dancing through life as he ‘foxtrotted mother off her feet’, and then, like many of his generation, had to apply his skills to killing people:

Called up to war, he lent his grace
to blowing up bridges; slow waltzed
across the Rhine on a raft of corpses.
A fact he wrapped in silence.

     There are, of course, limitations to this sort of poetry, in that the poet doesn’t need to extend much beyond the ordinary in language or description. But Plummer can write in other ways and there are poems in her book which deal with love affairs affected by racial differences and family relationships which founder on class differences. Not all of her poems are successful and some, like Brighton Rock, lapse into the picture-painting that poets often feel they need to indulge in when they visit somewhere new. This is a minor drawback, though, and most of the book is marked by a relaxed, warm feeling.