"The North (No 60 2018)" by Ann and Peter Sansom (eds)

£10 gets you over 150 big pages (two-column). 110 poems by 60 poets (D A Prince, Ilse Pedler, Carole Bromley, Jonathan Edwards, Kathryn Simmonds, etc), reviews and articles. It's a good read.

• John Lancaster has 7 poems. I don't know why.
• Kathryn Simmonds writes the odd good poem, but also many ordinary ones. She has 3 poems here, one of them good.
• Carole Bromley has 4 poems, but only "High Dependency" is any good.
• I'd like to be able to write like Nigel Pantling or Martha Sprackland about a poem. Here's Sprackland - "Something is lost. Perhaps it's only the sea, whose light 'broke in silver shards', as do so many visions which can only be revisited in the memory. Or perhaps it's memory itself that has been lost: the car moving along the road 'as loud as the airplane' whose trail, visible and solid enough at the beginning of the poem to sign its name on the sky in affirmation, fades through the poem to 'not so much as a snail's trail'. What causes something to lose its name, its signature, its ability to speak?". I don't think this is a faithful interpretation of the poem (I think she's cherry-picked and ignored the parts that didn't fit) but all the same.
• My favourite first stanza is from Emma Simon's "I Confess My Sins To The Electronic Scales" - "It speaks a language of loss I understand:/ the scantiness of half teaspoons of salt,/ a promise of absolution in a row of zeros". It's probably my favourite poem too.
• Linda Saunder's "The Railway-modeller's Farewell" is good.
• Judge David Constantine writes "It was heartening to note that almost all the poets in contention did ... address the common central facts of human existence: love, death, grief and the will to happiness. It reinforces one's faith in the whole endeavour of poetry"
• The poems exhibit a whole range of techniques except that there's little formal poetry (which may well be more to with the submissions than the editors' tastes). The subject matter's much more limited - the poems are nearly all human interest pieces.
• I liked "I wish I had more mothers" by Ann Gray
• I liked all but the final line of Emma Jeremy's "A hairbrush walks onto a train"
• "[Eric] Langley deftly uses page space to give a sense of the curator's confused location as a private public body interacting with the implications of new technology" (Andrew Jeffrey). I don't believe it.
• "Titles tend to summarise, to simplify or to indicate. [Thomas A] Clark's poems are humbler" (Philip Rush).