"The Poetry Review 105.3 (Autumn 2015)" by Maurice Riordan (ed)

Over 130 pages, about a third of them devoted to poems, in a magazine that now refers to itself as "TPR". I liked Longley's more than I usually do, and Liardet's. I've not heard of James Giddings. I liked his too. Helen Mort's "Ablation" and Simon Richey's "Still Life with Words" seem too minor. Ruby Robinson's was 7 pages - I gave up well before the end.

Mark Waldron writes "Often, for me, a single phrase can be so arresting that even if everything else in the poem is dull, I'll forgive it". I know the feeling. Jemmy Borg's "Quickening" has its moments - "My son in his ancient world is swallowing dreams". But for me there's also the converse. In an article where I have to take things on trust, a passage like "These poems speak in a voice of resonant mystery, detached yet tender" or "A plangent lyricism drives an implicit narrative of emotional complexity" can make me suspicious. My confidence is restored elsewhere -

• "Such restraint in the face of such subject matter is at the opposite pole from that sensationalism without substance one can find in Underwood" (William Wootten)
• "There is not a single poem collected here that does not whiff of the grad seminar room, where Prof Doty pauses proceedings to drift down yet another self-tickled semantic scenic route. ... Simply alluding to illustrious antecedents at every available juncture does not make you of their company" (Conor O'Callaghan)
• "However well these poems work on their own terms, I'm not struck by anything particularly original in their language, form or subject matter; or attracted by their tone or type of discourse, though that is partly a matter of taste. There's usually little left for the reader to imagine" (Fiona Moore on Annie Freud)

"Letter from Canada" seems misplaced in a journal like this one. The other articles and reviews are helpful, tempting me to add more books to my reading list. Less than a page of bios (in contrast, the latest Poetry Salzburg has 9 pages).

"The Poetry Review, V.104.1 (Spring 2014)", Maurice Riordan (ed)

This, the Poetry Society's magazine, has been going since 1912. Folio format, 144 pages. The last long-term editor, Fiona Sampson, wrote "I was reading 60,000 unsolicited submissions a year ... A really high proportion - a fifth - of the magazine when I edited it was by people who hadn't had their first book published, or who weren't well known". It's interesting to see how the new editor is shaping the magazine. There's a 16 page interview with Hugo Williams, about 30 pages of reviews, an 8 page essay on Gottfried Benn, and work by many poets including Paul Muldoon and Vicky Feaver.

There's a selection of poems from America's "Poetry" magazine (part of what's to become a regular exchange) with poems by Gluck, Patricia Lockwood, etc. In his introduction Riordan says "whereas in the 90s poets in this country reconnected with the vernacular, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry its its brief hegemony in the States." He thinks that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is now part of American poetry's DNA, and that the poetry has "something strenuous in the stretch and flex of the line, giving them a more willed vitality, a noisier heft of the barbells". I'm unsure what he means by that but here's part of the Lockwood poem (which I like) -

... Every bone in the snake is the hipbone, every part of the snake is the hips. The first sound I make is silence, then sssssshhh,            the first word I say is listen. Sheep shearers                  and accountants hypnotize the hardest, and lookout sailors who watch the sea, and the boys who cut and cut and cut and cut and cut the grass

The 2013 National Poetry Competition winners are announced. They beat about 12,000 other entries. Here are the first and last sentences of the top 3 -

• If a flower is always a velvet curtain/onto some peepshow he never opens,// it’s a shock to find himself sheltering/ from the storm in a greenhouse,// seduced by a leaf blushing blue/ at the tips, begging to be stroked. … He attempts to cool himself, thinking/ about sea horses, Hippocampus erectus,// listening to the rain refusing to stop, / soft against the steamed-up glass ("Bernard and Cerinthe", Linda France)
• There was a metal door that took both hands\ of a strong man to open\\ but we did it daily. … Sometimes we spun them on the make-believe dance\ floor, trying to turn despair into a party. ("Among Barmaids", Paula Bohince)
• Outside, air is balancing itself. … There’s a science and a logic to loving you,\\but there’s superstition on a night like this\  and all the stirring of the world to settle first ("Love on a Night Like This", Josephine Abbott)

Poetic at the start, emotional at the end, they're all in 2-line stanzas. Lines in the same stanza are usually nearly the same length. In France's poem the maximum difference is 14mm, though usually it's far less - no mean feat (the judge says that they're "precisely honed couplets"). The maximum difference in the other 2 poems is more like 5cm, but that happens only in a stanza or 2. The shape of things to come.

The reviews can be rather cutting. Strand's poetry is "bogusly gnomic and flippantly inconsequential" with "windy and irritating musings". Nagra doesn't get off lightly! I expected Helen Mort's book to get an easy ride. But no -

• "Opening with a scatter of glib biblical analogies"
• "It's astonishing, in fact, that Mort can satirise the impulse to 'make a blockbuster / from this', while making an equivalent poetic gesture herself"
• "so many poems here bluff out into contrived wordplay just at the moment where something real might happen"
• "Similarly catastrophic is ..."
• "This is, too frequently, a poetry of the easy option - an obscurantist punnery taking the place of any deep engagement"
• "disappointingly, this sleight of hand - the cheap trick switched into the place we might expect something real or profound - seems to be the characteristic move"

For details, see their website.