"poetry london (Summer 2021)"

A4, 68 pages (roughly 29 of poetry, 24 of reviews, 5 of interviews and 6 of autobiography). In the 2-page editorial by André Naffis-Sahely it says "we will publish poems that shock and unsettle. These poems will speak of trauma and injustice, because that is the world we live in. We will prioritize work that deals with issues of migration, economic injustice and freedom of speech".

Judging by the content of this issue, I can believe that - Claudia Rankine has a piece for a start. Christopher Soto has an 8 page poem that I don't get. Kevin Ospstedal has a page-long poem. I don't get that either, though he's the author of over 30 books. Among the authors are those who were/are staff/students at Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, and Harvard. No wonder I struggled.

To be fair, there are about 2 pages of non-translated, more old-fashioned poems (by Seán Hewitt, etc) and alongside translations from Arabic there's the 2-page "That Jewboy Hides From View".

Also to be fair, Alison Brackenbury reviews Rory Waterman (that said, she has an Oxford degree and he's a CW prof). The reviews all seem well-informed and interesting to me. And yet, and yet ... I got the impression that issue-driven and/or "experimental" poets were seldom adversely criticised, whereas the others were fair game. Rankine for example gets off scot free. In the introduction it says "We will not assist in creating a new élite of writers just as unanswerable and privileged as their predessors". Maybe so. Had I time I'd create stats about the poets whose work was faulted - looking at their gender, age, race, etc. As a start I tried to make a note of all the targets of adverse crits -

• Robert Selby - "Occasionally a poem ends flatly"
• Rory Waterman - "I would prefer 'University of Life' to skip two later modules ... its diminished rhymes are a distracting disappointment to the ear"
• Glyn Maxwell - "I find some of his riddles hard to follow ... His strengths [] can become formulaic. Contrasts sometimes play out too long ... Nor am I sure that his poems about writing are his best"
• Seán Hewitt - "Unfortunately, Hewitt's efforts in Tongues of Fire fall short of [Les Murray's] ... At times this lends the collection a sort of mid-century quaintness that sits unevenly with its coolness and maturity .... exhibits a regrettable propensity to anthropomorphise"
• Sean Borodale - "There are perhaps a few too many baffling half-images like this requiring more context, explanation or rhythmic impact to fully connect with the reader ... As a reading experience, the collection also lacks the narrative momentum of Bee Journal"
• Mesándel Virtuoso Arguelles - "they seem less powerful than the opening part, mostly due to their length and their complexity of the source material, which makes it harder for the reader to find those important connections between verses and paragraphs, rendering the reading perhaps too fragmentary and disconnected"