"Magma (No.84, 2022)"

Theme: Physics. Some of the poets are way more qualified in science/medicine than I am, others (I suspect) know a lot less. I most like "One by One" by Peter Daniels (not a physicist) and "Never leave the ship" by Rebecca Watts. There are many poems that I don't understand. When forms are used, I find them obscure. I think I've missed something

• "It might just" has 17 long-lined couplets, all ending in "bless" or "blessing". It's not a strict contraint, nor a difficult one to satisfy if padding and lack of variety of the words' usage is allowed. Why bother?
• "Aerodynamics of a Domestic" is 18 lines long. The number of times the word "geese" is used in each line is 1,0,2,1,2,0,1,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1. The pattern for the use of "argument[s]" is 1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,1,1,2,1,1,0,1,0. There are other repetitions too. I don't think labelling the text "poetry" makes the repetition any less tedious.
• "How to be 2-D" might be shaped. A table-leg cut in half? The content gives me too few clues. Linebreaks include "de-/pth", "ba-/lloon", and "f-ormless" so some device is being used. An acrostic? Syllabics? No.

In a prose piece, the redundancy in "a redshift toward/ the red end of the spectrum" (p.60) would be criticised.

Some of the reviews include phrases I don't understand, or don't see the point of, or are needlessly fancy -

• "Words, like the mind, are allowed to roam where the mind is perhaps not"
• "The language is descriptive and located, astutely coppiced at times to disrupt socially constructed narratives of viewing plant life"
• The poems "mime the undoing of human centrality"
• "This is a quiet and unassuming collection that at times can seem obscure and cryptic"

Reviewers, even if they think that readers might find poems "puzzling and inaccessible" or if they "want a narrative that isn't there" don't blame the poet.