"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).

"Fenland Poetry Journal (issue 2)", Elisabeth Sennitt Clough (ed)

Poetry (some of it more than a page long) and bios. There are nearly 50 pages of poems by several poets I've heard of. Jeremy Page has 6. In an age of cut-backs and web-based magazines it'll be interesting to see how this fares. It has an East Anglia flavour, which might help, and an editor who's in the ascendancy as a poet.

"Rattle (issue 57)"

Over 100 pages, 10 of them bios and 18 of them an interview with Ken Meisel. The magazine has 7,000+ subscribers, which is impressive.

Several of the pieces have starts or endings that would work well for stories -

• Start: You stick the chicken's head through a hole in a bucket. There's no guillotine or ax, just a little sharp knife to cut their throats, and you say, "Goodbye little chicken" and slit, slit, slit. It takes a couple of minutes for them to bleed (Edward Derby)
• Start: I inherited from my mother the knobbly joints and square ends of my fingers. From my father, I got the habit of biting my nails, their shortness. The frayed missing skin had never bothered me but now I have a son and he has begun to bite too. (Ananda Lima)
• Ending: His case was distinct from mine, the doctors reassured me, I could be cured again and again (Andrew Miller)
• Ending: I startle a flock of birds, that will never again be still (William Evans)
• Near-ending: She kept my books and a few LPs because I was going to come back (Ed Ruzicka)

"Pardoning the turkey" is prose, despite its couplets. "Pancake Dilemma" is à la Lydia Davis. "Who am I?" by Kelly Fordon has rhetorical repetition, but that's far from justifying its classification as poetry. Kelsey Hagarman's "The Visit" looks like something written as the result of a Flash prompt - except for the line-breaks. Dillon McCrea's "Self-portrait as an inkblot" uses a device that's used in other pieces too - it begins with a surprise, then tells a story whose ending repeats the image at the start, which now makes sense.

"Weed whacker" by Nancy Whacker is amongst the pieces I like.

"Lighthouse (issue 20)" (Gatehouse press, 2019)

It's an issue that features Flash (Tania Hershman, Meg Pokrass, etc), though there's still poetry, prose-poetry and prose. It's interesting to see different types of short texts side by side. I've written elsewhere about how to shorten texts. They can be made more narrow, more shallow, or (least successfully) just scaled down. Clarity can be sacrificed. If you take some prose, knock out a few words, remove punctuation, then add line-breaks, you can create something that readers are prepared to reconstruct into prose, as long as you call it poetry. Classified as prose, readers might think it badly written. Several of these shortening options are exploited in this issue. Poetic language and dislocations happen as much in the texts with many line-breaks as in the paragraphed texts.

Some well-known Flash writers have been giving a chance to supply blurb-sized quotes. It's difficult to find new ways to say that short texts can have big effects. Here's Christopher Gonzales - "Flash fiction is a writer's playground for form and voice. Great flash fiction can offer you the world in a pill-sized package". The first sentence makes Flash sound self-indulgent. The second sounds like drug-pushing - "pill" has negative connotations for me. Maureen Langloss writes that "Compression, intensity, and nuance are my favorite things about flash". My guess is that many poetry readers admire the same features. Are they any harder to pull off in prose? RB Pillay loves flash because it allows for traditional narrative, and because it also permits "a type of radically compressed narrative that is impossible to replicate at any other scale." Pillay's comments seem to accept the need for narrative of some sort. It's this requirement that cuts across the desire to add more poetic features. If a text sacrifices narrative, and has flashy imagery, I think it's more fairly described as poetry. Finola Scott's piece contains "On the unravelling pasture occasional trees cluster for company", which as prose might be considered purple. If the piece lacks line-breaks and is more a mood piece than a narrative then it's I'd say it's short prose rather than poetry or Flash.

I've noticed that people who offer their pieces as poems often don't like them to be re-classified as prose. The term "Poetry" still has an aura.

I didn't notice any Formalist pieces in this issue. A shopping list is a prose construction capable of managing discontinuities. The list format is used by poets, but I think prose writers could reclaim it. Ditto with Abecedarians - some foregrounding of language and form is possible in prose. The content, the amount of foregrounding, and the context will determine how successfully the writer might claim that the result is poetry.

Novel readers often don't like short stories. I wouldn't be surprised if short story readers didn't in general like Flash. I think certain poetry readers might like it, those who like accessible, character-based free-form poems with a bit of a twist. Such readers will appreciate the features that the Flash practitioners admire - compression, nuance, sense-based descriptions, lack of back-story, etc.

My favourite piece was Cheryl Pearson's poem, "What a fish dreams of".

"n+1, issue 30" (n+1 Foundation, 2018)

Politics, essays, reviews and fiction (2 stories). All worth reading, much of it two-columned. I learnt about the psychology of trolling, what it's like to be a boy who likes girls and also wants a sex change. My vocabulary has expanded to encompass "dox" and "TERF" (trans-exclusionary radical feminist - "We know what's at work when whites wear blackface; the same thing is at work when men wear drag" - Meghan Morgan). I now know that Valerie Solansas's "SCUM Manifesto" was self-published a year before she shot Andy Warhol, and that SCUM at one point stood for "Society for Cutting Up Men".

"Two weeks in the capital" was too long to impress me. In general the essays/articles were longer than I'm used to, though most included notable phases - e.g. "Capitalism is eating its young. It's only feeding us avocados to fatten us up first"; "personal branding becomes indistinguishable from social life in general" (Gabriel Winant). "Only a generation raised on a diet of gold stars could think that way" (Malcolm Harris).

"Strix (issue 6, 2019)"

A magazine of poetry and short prose (3 stories 1000-1500 words long). A4 height, A5 width. 60 pages - "hand-made". Work by Richie McCaffery, Steve Ely, Carole Bromley, Roy Marshall, etc. No bios, no reviews. Few of the poems are paraphrasable - duende abounds, for example in Michelle Diaz's "Body" ("How do we locate the haunting in us? ... I am tired of planning my exorcism. Let the ghosts make me a ballroom") or Stuart Charlesworth's "We lie under sky-blue blankets watching nurses" which ends with "The nurses sail around in our blood/ reading books full of ways/ to keep us confined". Not an easy read, but a rewarding one.

"mslexia 70"

An 84-page A4 magazine for "women who write" with a focus on the UK scene. Small text, so that there's lots to read. There are about 15 pages of poems/stories. Mostly it's adverts (small ads as early as p.12, showing how integral they are), market information, listings, features and articles. They've opted for many short articles and snippets rather than a few longer pieces. It's all useful for writers who send work away.

The leading article by Debbie Taylor considers the plight of litmags. She points out that Rialto gets 12,000 poems a year and prints 150, that a "combination of passion and (relative, if not outright) poverty is typical of the vast majority of souls working in the litmag sector", that in 2016 about a third of mags were print only, a third were online-only, and the rest were mixes of various proportions, and that the editors' own work often suffers because of time constraints. Granta and The London Magazine have private backing.

"Rialto 91 (2018)" by Michael Mackmin (ed)

An A4, 60 page (mostly two-column) magazine that's never gone in for reviews, though it's had the odd article. It used to contain art-work. The recent frequent changes of assistant editorship (internships, etc) have kept the magazine fresh. It's always felt to me like a magazine open to all - Les Murray's sometimes in it, so are relative newcomers. This issue has Jen Campbell, Hannah Lowe, Jack Underwood, etc. and a few translations.

"Popshot magazine (issue 18)", Jacob Denno (ed)

50 colourful pages rather bigger than A5. No bios, though there are "Endnotes" that tell us, for example, that a story "is the author's acknowledgement of the need to take control of their own life and happiness, and to try to bring light to others". Each poem/story is illustrated, most of them successfully. The theme of this issue is "Light". Except for the Antarctic piece (set in the time of Scott) and "Last Light", the stories are all at the magic realism end of fantasy. Occasionally (especially with "In the place of our parents") I wondered whether the final paragraph was required.

"Lighthouse (issue 17)", Jo Surzyn and Julia Webb (eds), Gatehouse Press

64 A5 pages. The theme was science - poetry, flash, short stories and essays. Many interesting pieces. My favourite ones were by Anne Bailey (poems) and Marc John (an SF story, sort of).

Anne Osbourn's article begins by discussing specialism, not only in science. She points out that there are benefits to society with having specialists, but the resulting breakdowns in communication may be dangerous. I agree with this. Scientists and artists/writers (or their representatives) need to transmit their findings, to help the public appreciate the latest Tate exhibition, atonal symphony, global warning, number theory, etc. After all, it's the public who pays them. It's the public who deserve to know why some charlatan performance poet or ivory tower pure mathematician is publicly funded while people are dying through lack of NHS funding. Outreach and Open Days are good things.

Half way through, the article turns to seeking common factors between the arts and sciences. It's here that I begin to have trouble. She writes that they both "involve a combination of creativity and technical competence", and that they "depend on the ability to define a problem ... and extract the essence of the problem in hand". Even were this so, it also applies to knitting a cardigan, preparing a cake, etc. It's how humans do things.

Then she writes that "The ultimate objective for both is to pinpoint the truth, and to communicate this clearly and succinctly to others for appraisal". I don't think it is. Her conclusion is that "We all look at things in different ways. Together we can draw on our strengths and differences to build up a patchwork of understanding, a better approximation of the truth". I try not to use the word "truth" in such circumstances - it means too many different things. Truth in logic is so far from the Truth in religion that it's misleading to use the same word. Besides, it seems to me that poets have backed away from claiming to be Seers, to be seeking great Truths.

I have abiding doubts about Valerie Laws but at least her article "Poetry and Science, Beauty and Truth" ends with "if there is more than one kind of truth or beauty, that is all the more cause for celebration".

"Magma 70" (Spring 2018)

86 big, nearly square pages - about 50 of poetry (3 poems/page sometimes), 10 of reviews, and a wide selection of articles. Poems by Matt Sweeney, Richie McCaffery, Josh Ekroy, etc. This issue has a "Europe" theme, to which it sticks quite closely. There are different themes and editors each issue. The feature that struck me was that several of the poems repeat a word many times - "Invitation" has "Hotel Europa" in each of its 10 stanzas; "Les Vacances" has "Monsieur" in each of its 4 stanzas; "Duck Three Ways" has "aka" 5 times and "According to" 3 times; "La Monnaie" has 16 lines starting with "In the"; "Hungarians" has "Hungarians" 8 times, and "Slowly, as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere" has "nowhere" in each of its 14 lines. There's a fair amount of non-standard typography too.

The launch was in Europe House with well over 100 attendees on Apr 6th. I managed to squeeze in at the back.

"South 56" (October 2017)

About 50 packed pages, 7 of them containing reviews and 3 with articles/letters. A featured poet (Jean Watkins) occupies 11 pages. Other poets include Gill McEvoy, Jenny Hamlett, DA Prince (who also is a reviewer), etc. Well crafted pieces, non-experimental.

"Brittle Star (Issue 39)"

The Winter 2016 issue, containing about 90 pages of poetry, stories, articles and reviews, stylishly presented with graphics (bookcovers, headshots and adverts). Authors include Richie McCaffery, Graham Mort, Wayne Burrows, etc. My favourite pieces were by Jenny Booth.

In this issue's articles there's a focus on structure/form both in poetry and prose. The range of works is wide. One review ends with "it is uncynical, a little old-fashioned and warm-hearted: in short, rather charming". In contrast there are also rather experimental poems like Rodney Woods', which begins with

dandelions gone mad / tulips were brutal / I expected an invasion the lawn neglected / untouched / dandelions gone mad / tulips were brutal the lawn neglected / untouched / I expected an invasion

and Edd Ravn's dialogues (between red and wet, between blue and bright). There's attractive, more mainstream imagery too - e.g. Michael W Thomas' poem includes "the pines are shadows that once thought in green".

"ARTEMISpoetry (Issue 16, May 2016)"

A 64-page A4 bi-annual journal of women's writing with poetry by Katherine Gallagher, Penelope Shuttle, Isobel Thrilling, Myra Schneider, Ilse Pedler, Moniza Alvi, etc. There's information, interviews and many reviews.

It's published by Second Light Publications, the publishing arm of Second Light network (full membership available for women over 40; associate membership available for women 30-40). It's perhaps the age restriction as much as the gender that affects the content.

In an interview, Myra Schneider writes "cliques dominate the poetry scene and work that's 'fashionable' is often overpraised while many good poets are undervalued. ... such attention as the media gives to poetry is often to work which is clever, abstruse or poor". She doesn't mention the names of these over-praised people. A shame. Later, we read that "I write about the natural world and the environment which greatly concerns me, childhood, relationships, and I feature myth and history". Reading this magazine I think she's not alone in these pre-occupations, which are usually understated. Decent poems, all the same.

Here's all the (potentially) adverse criticism that I could find in the reviews. Note how they're often tempered

• there are few nuances and little space for alternative interpretations
• Just occasionally I thought a closing, rounding-off observation detracted from the poem as a whole ... But these are very small criticisms
• So many of these poems are direct, honest, up-beat with some touches of ruefulness and irony
• her poems are sometimes a little over-extended
• This collection may seem in some respects 'straight-down-the-middle' but thoughtfulness and the occasional sharp insight make these poems worthwhile
• a somewhat dense and hermetic style of writing which takes some getting used to ... the meaning here and there is a shade clotted. The poems are not always released into the lyric freedom which would suit some of the subject matter ... [She] probes and - of course - cannot always resolve big issues. She sometimes used poetic devices, including personification, with a slightly heavy hand. But overall these poems are alive, engaging and interesting
• These poems approach the world from an acute angle and so risk having little direct appeal to some readers. But modern taste favours poems that are more oblique ... I found some poems over-detailed ... and the subject matter of some poems seemed inconsequential ... But this poet has strengths. ... Some of these poems are a little too contrived and self-consciously 'off-centre'. There, too, little direct feeling to suit a more old-fashioned taste. These are, however, the pet faults and inverted attractions of today

"The North (No.57, 2017)", Ann Sansom and Peter Sansom (eds)

190 pages, 22cm by 21cm, small print. 173 poems by 84 poets (Graham Mort, David Constantine, Susan Wicks, Peter Riley, etc). Lots to read.

There are articles about Shirley McClure, John Riley, poetry for children, Jack Spicer, favourite books chosen by 30 smith|doorstep poets, etc. The standard features are "Poets I Go Back To", "Blind Criticism", "Close Reading", "In Conversation" (Susan Wicks with Jackie Wills this time) and "Featured Title" (a Peter Riley book this time). Of the 14 reviewers, 6 have had pamphlets/books published by smith|doorstep. I noted a few things -

• "In a way I feel that having kids is almost an equivalent of going to war, historically, for men, the way women have put their bodies at risk, their identities at risk, allowing their lives to change suddenly" - Susan Wicks (p.146)
• "The bedside lamp's afterglow is all at once 'an aspirin ... dissolving in a glass of darkness' and I put the lamp back on, reach for Transtromer" - Mark Pajak, (p.97)
• "If books are the flagships of the literary world, then pamphlets are our kayaks and coracles - sleek and nimble, they can navigate more easily the 'music of what happens', and part the waters for larger vessels that sail in their wake" - Theophilus Kwek, (p.178)
• "A wheelie bin crosses the road without looking,/ lands flat on its face on the other side, spilling/ its knowledge" ('The Met Office Advises Caution', Rebecca Watts)
• David Tait writes of Jennifer Copley's "The Living Daylights" - "I'm still amazed that pamphlet didn't win some big prizes"

"Banipal 52" , Samuel Shimon (ed)

A magazine of Modern Arab Literature - 224 pages with many extracts from novels. The translations are excellent as far as I can tell. There are quite a few tales of culture shocks. There are many prisons and injustices. Sometimes the pieces feel like sociology and politics made more entertaining. It's a risk the writers and reviewers are aware of. In his review of a book about Khaled Mattawa, Robin Ostle writes -

• "Certain writers are inextricably linked with political causes, and their readers and public come to expect that they remain the voice of that cause", p.180
• "In most cases the periods of positive interaction between art and politics are of short duration, and the longer they go on, the more problematic they are likely to be", p.181

Writers know that they'll get a wider readership if they deal with atrocities. With stories set in some places it's hard for writers to avoid dealing with topics that might appear sensationalist to UK-based readers.

There are reviews of (re-printed) novels that have complex or modernist structures, but the published texts were rather traditional.

"Under the Radar 18", Jane Commane (ed)

If magazine mainstream poetry steers a path between obscure/academic and accessible, then perhaps it could be said that the mainstream has drifted rather towards the poetry-for-poets end of the spectrum, perhaps due to the increase in the number of knowledgeable poets (Creative Writing graduates). The pieces in "Under the Radar" could represent this New Mainstream (bracketed between Poetry London and Acumen, say, and ever-widening). They follow no agenda. Some are easily enjoyed by non-literature people, others (e.g. "This is just to say") benefit from a grounding in the classics, though they remain accessible. None are extreme. Traditional form is rare though - poems with no line-breaks at all are more common than rhyming poems. A few things struck me -

• Ellie Danak's "Her Story" has 8 lines following the template "When she says ... , we must listen" followed by one line with the pattern "When she says ... , we won't listen". The repetition is about 50% of the text.
• My favourite poem is "Supermarket" by Josh Ekroy.
• Fiona Theokritoff's "Cartographer" ends with "When you left, it was a tsunami/ but I did not drown./ I made another map."
• Joe Caldwell's "Transmigration" includes "Let me ... rise higher until the cities and towns/ are like mazes in puzzle books,// the rivers signatures"
• Giles Goodland's "Commuting" begins with "The sun rinses its fingers through/ the canal's dishwater trance"
• Beth Somerford uses in-line spaces but no punctuation. The spaces aren't always replacements for punctuation, nor are the line-breaks or drop-lines.
• The pieces I'd recategorise as short prose are on p. 10, 34, 36, 38, 43, 46, 49, 58, 65.

There's c.60 pages of poetry, 13 of stories and c.25 of reviews (by an impressive cast of reviewers - Alison Brackenbury, Maria Taylor, D A Prince, John Foggin and Peter Carpenter)

"Poetry Ireland Review (issue 110)" by John F Deane (ed)

128 pages, with about 50 pages of poetry and 8 pages of colour art. Shuttle, Oxley and Judy Brown are amongst the foreign contributors. There are obits/appreciations of Jack Gilbert and Dennis O'Driscoll, and one of the last poems of Tom Duddy. There's a 9-page essay on Gerry Murphy with a dense page of notes, and a 13 page essay reprinted from the Catullus Festival (Lake Garda, 2006) - "[the poor] named a public house in the Liberties district after him long before the Irish Tourist Board determined that every pub in Dublin should display the images of about least ten writers". Poems range from the bland (Sweeney) to the obscure (Mary O'Driscoll, whose notes informed me that the Irish language alphabet has only 18 letters) - e.g a good mix.

"The Stinging Fly (issue 34/volume 2)"

In September 2016 they tweeted that for their next issue they'd received over 800 submissions including more than 500 short stories. This issue has about 130 pages - roughly 75 of stories, 26 of poems, 12 of interviews/articles and 11 of reviews. They say that they have a particular interest in "promoting the short story form". I liked Nicole Flattery's story the most, and of the poems, Stav Poleg's "Cartwheels". Liz Gallagher's story was too advanced for me. Marcus Mac Conghail's poem (translated from the Irish) was too plain - starlings and lava lamps again.

"The Cannon's Mouth (issue 61)"

A quarterly by Cannon Poets, from Birmingham. Such magazines are a dying breed. It publishes poems, reviews and articles by members and others, the poets having published in Acumen, Rialto, Orbis, South, etc. 56 pages with a colour cover. This issue has obits for Geoffrey Hill and Yves Bonnefoy