A new editor, so it's time to review the Poetry Society's magazine again. The split's roughly 50 pages of Poetry, 50 pages of Reviews, and 30 pages of Essays/Articles.
Poetry
Big pages, which make thin poems look even thinner. There are poems that baffle me (by Bie Brahic for example. I liked her book but her poem here isn't a promising start to the issue). I didn't understand Ishion Hutchinson's poems but he's published by Faber so he must be good (his first poem begins with "And love grows angel in the gloom/ with your calls through resistant stars"). I can't believe that Matthew Sweeney got 4 (!) poems in by virtue of their quality. I've learnt to expect little of about poems/selections whose title begins with "from". "from WITCH" in this issue confirms my hypothesis. There are poems of a type I've tried writing myself, so I know they're not so hard to do (e.g. about courgettes). The poems I like include "Snow" and maybe "Two cats". Lidiart's look ok too.
Essays/Articles
The article writers or the commissioner have something to learn from "The Dark Horse", "Tears in the Fence", etc. The topics are peripheral. The 5 (!) pages of photos (and the generous white space around them) accompanying "Seven Thousand Songs" are a waste of space. The article itself is little better. I don't like the manifestos either - too mundane or mysterious.
Reviews
Amongst the reviews are these comments -
- twenty-first century British "Parnassian" [] balances colloquial interjection with lyrical onrush (John Greening)
- Jorie Graham's Fast is a breathtaking meditation in an emergency, a reflection of our time reconfigured by technology, overshadowed by war, threatened by environmental change, dominated by human greed, and haunted by sickness and bereavement (Kit Fan)
- Stainer's poems are full of gravitations towards silence, disappearance, and nothingness, unafraid to tease out and heighten the tension between the physical and the metaphysical (Kit Fan)
- Like Graham, Stainer engages with science with an unflinching curiosity and precision (Kit Fan)
- Unfliching, sometimes dramatic, sometimes lyrical, the work is notable for the range and subtlety of its thought (Ellen Cranitch)
- Their cartoonish kookiness feels more calculated than playful, and too often to no end (Jane Yeh)
After a while I stopped trusting some of the reviewers, though several of the reviews were informative. I liked Kit Fan's discussion of Graham's use of pronouns.
General
Claudia Rankine's "Citizen" is mentioned more than once. "Prose-like" poetry is mentioned in reviews and abounds in the poetry sections.
In all areas there's material that looks content- rather than quality-driven. In the poetry world a too hasty attempt to make all the ratios what we think they "should be" has consequences which aren't quite so obviously measurable, especially if the poems are obscure. I wonder when the readers were last surveyed. Is this the sort of magazine they want? Or what the grant-giving bodies want?
