Now Magma 41 has added the creative friction of collaboration to the Magma mix. Karen Green and Linda Black have had a frustrating but invariably fruitful time editing number 41, sometimes fighting, occasionally spontaneously agreeing, but finally coming up with something, we hope you will agree, a little more special than the sum of its always glorious parts.
Carol Rumens has given us a wonderful Presiding Spirits, and John Hegley, our angst-ridden cover boy, has chosen D H Lawrence’s ‘Tortoise Family Connections’ for a fascinating tortoise-related meditation. There is an excellent account of the poetry scene in Cornwall by Helen Wood, and two specialist pieces on collage by Jemma Borg and Linda Black (wearing a different hat). Our reviews are probing and delicious and will introduce you to the must-read poetry books.
Our Showcase Poet Mark Waldron writes unusual and distinctive poetry; in fact many poets in Magma 41 have appealed to us by being, not unlike Mark, somewhat oblique and off-centre in their voices.
We have a wide-ranging field of poems including prose poems (Carrie Etter, Lucy Hamilton, Jane Monson). We have forms as different as Mary MacRae’s ghazals and Kit Fan’s decorative stanzas in ‘The Gardener of Qufu’. We have familiar stars such as John Burnside and Selima Hill, but we have many many new stars.
