The inspiration for the latest issue of Magma comes from Kafka’s comment that ‘Words are ice-axes for the frozen sea within’, putting the focus on poems that find new and powerful ways of engaging with feeling. As well as previously unpublished work by celebrated poets Gillian Clarke and Vicki Feaver, there are also poems by the winners of the 2008 Gregory Awards for best poets under 30. We have Matthew Sweeney responding to the Austrian poet George Trakl and Blake Morrison writing about ‘Poetry of Departures’ by Philip Larkin. In addition to our usual reviews, there’s a discussion of prose poetry, an article on the contemporary poetic imagination and an exploration of developments in poetry in education and what it means to young people.
Articles
| The New Imagination |
Laurie Smith explores how poetry may help us to survive. I want to suggest that the poetic imagination is currently undergoing radical change and that, if poets are attentive to this, it will lead to poetry of greater strength, variety and influence than Britain has seen for nearly 200 years. I will consider why the… |
| Poetry in Practice - Contained Waywardness |
Jane Monson reviews Inventory by Linda Black (Shearsman). For readers who consider the prose poem to be poetic prose, a genre without its own identity or status, or worse still, badly written prose, then Linda Black’s Inventory is not for you. It is, however, for you if you want to acquaint or reacquaint yourself with… |
| Poetry in Practice - Are prose poems poems? |
Hannah Salt asks some basic questions. Prose poems appear more and more frequently in magazines, anthologies and collections, and it is worth asking in what sense prose poems are poems. This isn’t a merely reactionary question. Unless we can be clear about the possibilities of prose poetry, they may not easily be achieved. Some prose… |
| Editorial |
For this edition of Magma we requested poems that seek new ways of engaging with feeling, that respond to Kafka’s comment that “Words are ice-axes for the frozen sea within”. The response has been enormous with more poems being submitted than ever before. Many poets clearly hunger to express feeling more directly, to break through… |
Supported by Arts Council England