In the poem, Wicks skilfully interweaves the original narrative with a more intimate domestic tableau, where

Next to the back door
the tongues of our battered trainers
strain under laces, swell
crusted and luminous.

Throughout the collection the body is often in a state of flux, whether from ageing, sickness or an inflicted violence. In ‘Under the Blue Umbrella’ Wicks juxtaposes a fragile and metaphorically encircled Mediterranean idyll with wider political concerns: “No one’s heart clenches here. No one is seen to bleed/from the anus, or stand naked at a wall to be shot.” Likewise, the ‘Untitled (Wheelchair)’ after the Lebanese/Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, which like many poems here, gives voice where voice is lost. Even the seemingly anecdotal sonnet, ‘Box’, about a topiary bush in the shape of a bird, which “daily becomes less bird, and more completely bush” provokes a contemplation of the ongoing human wrestle with nature, the manicured garden versus wilderness, bush against bird.

This sense of tension and fragility is elegantly expressed elsewhere. In a short sequence at the beginning of the central section, ‘What She Was’, deer wander into the house, and the narrator has to “wake/and feel their noses on my face,/my breasts, nudging between my thighs.” Here Wicks avoids the myriad ‘Bambi’ pitfalls and instead manages to capture the experience via a precise and visceral approach:

I sensed rather than saw them move
in the darkness, the dark fractionally displaced
at the edge of seeing…

The sea is also a recurrent motif and is often a conduit for the book’s emotional and thematic core. In the opening poem, ‘Pistachios’, physical ageing is pitched against a sensuous vivacity, yet these contradictions are empowered by simple expression. If sex, “as they say, is a kind of dying” then you “never know exactly when/or where or how fast/sex leaves” as it’s carried out on the tide. Later, in the lyrical ‘Inside the Movement’, the idea of death as process is expanded and it’s “as if the land itself had had a stroke”.

Against this quietly unsettled backdrop, there’s a deep sense of hope embedded in the heart of the work; if there are environmental imperatives humankind must attend to, then the fact that “we’re built for loss” (‘Inside the Movement’) is perhaps a more optimistic thought than it seems. A lesser poet might have rendered these ecological themes dull or clichéd; Wicks energises the subject through adroit and stylish handling that is confident but never showy.

The final section entitled ‘Nightwatchman’s Yard’ is set in Visby, a medieval city on the Swedish island of Gotland. Wicks builds a historical picture through a series of poems that give voice to the city’s saints, warriors, workers and villains. It opens with the monologue ‘Confession’; set in 1350 it’s the story of an embittered church organist who deliberately poisons the town’s wells with bubonic plague so that: “Now I can let my voice/howl in your pipework, echo to the town walls: how I spit on each upright soul/in this stinking city…” As in ‘House of Tongues’, sound – and specifically the voice – becomes a charged leitmotif through which both revenge and injustice are enacted.

At this point there is also a sense of release; as if the restraint of writing from the self is cast off, allowing the poet to run riot within the anarchy of embattled medieval society. Everything that was economically held back pours forth in these vigorous narratives, whether it’s the blithe sense of entitlement that infuses the utterances of the invading Dane Valdemar IV in ‘The Plundering of Visby’ or Little Ingeborg, “A woman alone/with her child and her child’s child” who is tried as a witch. What connects them to the other poems is emotional authenticity and the sense that the dystopia we experience now was ever thus.

Karen McCarthy Woolf
Karen McCarthy Woolf’s poetry chapbook The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2006. Her poetry also featured in the anthology, TEN New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010, ed. Bernardine Evaristo & Daljit Nagra).

House of Tongues is published by Bloodaxe, 2011, £8.95.

for blog review 5, see Dave Coates on Noel Duffy’s ‘In the Library of Lost Objects’
for blog review 4, see Miriam Gamble on Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’

This refreshing curiosity about the inner workings of the stellar bodies, magnetic fields, beehives and fossils is the fuel for his poems; richness, even in such mundane things, comes from being in a world in which life is precious and survival always possible. A few key poems lend the book a sense of cohesion and, with ideas so thoroughly connected, even a few lesser pieces gain in vitality.

‘The Summer I Mapped the World’, with its one word of Irish, éaligh: escape, is a poem of childhood in which (unlike many of his contemporaries) Duffy’s experience is viewed without a nostalgic filter. Once he éalighs the classroom, his solo project is to make a map of his town using only a notebook and his counted strides as a meter. The lines “At last the roads locked into place, joined up/ as they should across the barren spaces” are a fully-achieved expression of the feeling when a poem clicks in the reader’s mind, one that still makes sense within the boundaries of the poem’s conceit.

When the cogs mesh, Duffy crafts some brilliant set-pieces. ‘The Beekeeper to his Assistant’ is another poem that gets the dynamic between tenor and vehicle spot-on, fluctuating seamlessly between experience and instinct, scientific fact and anecdote, the art of beekeeping and the tradition of poetry:

You must understand from the beginning
that the hive is a mind and one
you will not comprehend.

And then (with the Queen Bee as subject):

Unknowingly she gives birth to her own successor
incubated in the brood and hidden from her.

This is a fantastic poem, and one I hope gets its fair share of exposure.

‘The Beekeeper to his Assistant’ also mentions Albert Einstein, who as a less-than-stellar pupil himself is something of a patron spirit. The poem he gets to himself, ‘Einstein’s Compass’, is an anthem to absent-mindedness, as the boy Albert is derided by an unnamed voice for his unbroken attention to his father’s compass and its steady needle:

when will the boy learn,
that it will never do otherwise,
that he breaks his mother’s heart
with his silent vigils?

Einstein once said “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” It is the book’s similarly modest, unwritten epigram.

‘Baltic Amber’ does the kind of stitch-work that most books only dream of having. So many threads find a common ground here it’s almost worth quoting in full, but to summarise: an ant caught in amber “in the afternoon heat of the Paleolithic” (wow), is an “emblem and lifeline/ of all that perishes, all that survives.” These lines shed sudden light on five or six other poems and position the preserved ant as the ideal symbol of poetry’s work of consecration, restoration and survival.

The closing poem, ‘Swallows’, draws a circle around a series of poems about Duffy’s late father; the swallows that appear “the day after I wrote your poem” are heavy with emotional and metaphorical freight. It’s not quite possible to tell what has been imagined and what has fallen serendipitously into place, but ‘Swallows’ is convincing enough for that not to matter. Duffy’s work is rooted in a deep study of his medium and, although not without occasional shortcomings, the poems in In the Library of Lost Objects work in concert in a way very few books achieve.

Dave Coates
Dave Coates grew up in Belfast and lives in Edinburgh. He writes about poetry on his blog, http://davepoems.wordpress.com. His new year’s resolution is to write on it more often.

In the Library of Lost Objects is published by Ward Wood, 2011, £7.99.

for blog review 4, see Miriam Gamble on Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’.

We were also fortunate to host a large number of contributors, many of whom had travelled some distance – from Sweden, Switzerland, Brussels and even California.

The uniqueness of the Magma launches is that everyone whose work is in the issue is invited to read, and one of the joys of being a Magma editor is that you have the opportunity to meet many of the contributors and hear them read their work, poems you have sifted and re-sifted out of many thousands: poems you love and have read deeply. It’s also a gratifying sight to watch an audience riffling through their copies of the magazine to find the page and read along.

During her reading, Selima Hill spoke of her pleasure at being ‘among poets’ and said something to the effect that rather than feeling separated from her audience at the reading, which is so often the case, she felt as if we were all in it together. Which seems a good place to end this little blog – thanks to everyone – contributors, subscribers, and audience for being ‘in it’ with us.

Pascale Petit

Alison Brackenbury

Alan Buckley

Mark Leech

The richest events occur in us long before the soul perceives them. And, when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have long since committed ourselves to the invisible.

Gabriele D’Annunzio

Poets are often advised to  ‘find a voice.’ This voice can only come,  I think, from the unique past and terroir of the poet.  In his essay, ‘Something to Write Home About’, Seamus Heaney describes growing up in Ireland between the Catholic and the Protestant communities, between a railway and a road, between the sound of a trotting horse and that of a shunting engine, between a variety of accents and dialects. One of the dialect words which lodged in his memory from that past was ‘hoke’.

‘The word means to root about and delve into and forage for and dig around, and that is precisely the kind of thing a poem does so well. A poem gets its nose to the ground and follows a trail and hokes its way by instinct to the real centre of what concerns it.’

Born in the middle of the Depression, money was short, but there was a freedom which now seems unthinkable, and I too grew up as an in-between: between two world wars; between a rural community and the chimneys of the nearby textile mills;  between the sounds of farm animals and shunting trains; between the speech patterns of my family and the rich Lancashire dialects of the neighbouring village and mill-towns; between a Catholic mother and a Protestant father and between their two gods: my father’s Our-Father-Which-Art, who had the  Power and the Glory, and my mother’s Our-Father-Who-Art, who did not.

Heaney (in his youth, a keen devourer of comics) proposes that the recitations of simple ballads and verses which children were, in the past, expected to perform at parties and to visiting relatives, gave verse, however humble, a place in the home, made it one of the ordinary rituals of everyday life.

We too learnt poems by heart and to recite them, learnt to sing hymns, folk songs and music-hall ballads. There were also prayers, the old fairy stores, Beatrix Potter, the Dandy and Beano comics, Churchill’s wartime speeches, English and Latin liturgies, the austere grandeurs of Gregorian chant; all of these fed me with an eclectic mix of words and rhythms to top-up the rhymes, singing-games and skipping  of the playground, and all became gloriously muddled in my head -

Bye, Baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting  …  Introibo ad altare Dei, ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meum … Soldier, soldier, won’t you marry me, with your musket, fife and drum? … I  have loved, Oh Lord, the beauty of Thy house and the place where Thy glory dwelleth … as I were goin’ o’er Treacle Moor, I met me old sweet’eart, Mickey Plum; ‘e said, art tha goin’ t’funeral?  … one-pertater, two pertater, three pertater, four; five pertater, six pertater, seven pertater more … Vere dignum et justem est, equam et salutare… O. U .T  spells out, and out you must go  …

It is by ‘hoking’ about in this past that I grope my way into the future while stumbling through the present, where the reading of contemporary poetry has become a passion and a necessity, an essential  way to find a voice which, while still the product of the past, may also come to reflect my life and preoccupations now.

In this, poetry magazines are invaluable. For the price of a glass of wine in many London pubs, one can still buy excellent poetry magazines. Most of us have our favourites (usually those clear-sighted enough to publish us), but I have always had a particular affection for Magma.

reflecting every colour and none,
playing I-Spy with the gleams of a mind

‘Caw Poem’ contains everything we might justifiably look for in the début work of a poet of promise. Darcy’s ear is pitch-perfect, as displayed in her deft imitation of the magpie’s movements:

I cocked my head,
hopped a little, hopped a little closer,
love become a scrum, a scuffle,
a ruffle of feathers

The opening is arresting, and cuts straight to the chase:

Not atriums and ventricles that cup and pour

Finally, imagistic and linguistic innovation is at a premium, both effortless and bang on the money:

a solitary magpie
beats cricked wings

“Cricked” is the mark of her ability as a wordsmith. Yet the poem offers much, much more, and it’s this that sets Darcy apart from the ranks of capable word-turners and puts her in that special place reserved for the very few – for poets who matter, have something to say that’s worth the hearing. You can’t matter as a poet if you don’t have style, but neither can you if it’s all you’re equipped with. Darcy’s poems have style and substance; indeed, in her work, they are one and the same.

‘Caw Poem’ enacts a kind of bricolage which recurs throughout the collection and recalls both MacNeice’s plea for “an impure poetry” and Muldoon’s baffled and baffling sense of random interconnection and segue. Early in his career (and, one suspects, with more than the tip of his tongue in his cheek), Muldoon said something to the tune that he’d love to be able to write simple poems, pure poems, ‘lovely little lyrics’, but couldn’t do it. ‘Caw Poem’ closes with the conditional urge to “plunder some bright thing, / learn to sing true”, but Darcy, like Muldoon, is astute enough to recognise that “truth” doesn’t come in pebbles of quartz, and that conviction is frequently culpable. Many of her poems are (in a good way) about poetry, the working through and questioning of her own aesthetic – ‘Terminus’, for example, which both yearns for and dismisses the knack of “lay[ing] it on the table”, or ‘Socks’, which toys hilariously with Terry Eagleton’s pronouncement on “the inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language…[which is] in a broad sense political”:

I wear my socks odd, queer
bags a couple of feet from my

knees…

…I believe
that’s right – the way you can’t tell
what colour my knickers will be.

The fun of this shouldn’t, however, (and doesn’t) obscure the underlying seriousness of poems which themselves invest in the concept of the “unfinished” and the “political” in language, but are justifiably sceptical as to its force. At the heart of Darcy’s writing is a desperate desire for poetry to measure up, have real value in a world of “parataxis” and “bodies degraded / in mixed media” (‘La rue est rentrée dans la chambre’); for it to function as a means by which, if not to make sense of such a world, at least to challenge it. One of the most likeable and convincing things about her, though, is her irrepressible tendency to self-question, revert to “doubting / [her] own innocence” (‘Terminus’) at every turn.

While ‘Stump’ gives a fair indication of what Darcy isn’t about – the organically whole poem that finishes with a resounding, self-satisfied “Whump” – ‘Panopticon’ and ‘Umheimlich’ explore the inevitable and ultimately necessary “anaesthetic” role of “an aesthetic”. Both are addressed to suicides – those who couldn’t or wouldn’t indulge in the lie of systems, “do the awful maths” – and who chose silence rather than the “the noise” which “circles us” “at the centre of a shrinking globe”. So vigilant is Darcy her vigilance extends to this painful understanding that the very means by which she hopes to rock the boat is the means by which ‘world’ is coped with – systematised – and thus made liveable to her. ‘Panopticon’, incidentally, performs a characteristically brilliant inversion on Bentham’s original application of the term – in Darcy’s hands it’s the watcher who’s imprisoned, not the watched. And from this dinning mélange are culled the poems.

The title of Imaginary Menagerie bespeaks diversity, the mixed bag of the first book in which the neophyte tries his or her hand at this and that without yet knowing where to go or why. In this sense it is impishly misleading, for Darcy has, as Kevin Higgins remarks, a clear sense of “purpose” and the book is utterly coherent. On the other hand, diversity’s the turf these poems tread, from metamorphoses to poly-linguistic stews. There are, in any case, few better collections to carry with you “at the eye of the panopticon”. The mix is daring, and never off the mark.

Miriam Gamble
Miriam Gamble’s first collection is ‘The Squirrels Are Dead’ (Bloodaxe 2010), which won a Somerset Maugham Award.

Imaginary Menagerie by Ailbhe Darcy is published by Bloodaxe, 2011, £8.95

for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’.

I’ve been trying to think what makes a really short poem good and, at first, there seems no answer – great short poems are as varied as longer ones.  When the Magma team decided on the 10 line limit, we thought of some famous short poems – Blake’s The Sick Rose, Wordsworth’s A slumber did my spirit seal, Herrick’s Upon Julia’s Clothes which Eavan Boland had written brilliantly about in Magma 48.  And we could all think of very short poems in recent collections which we’d enjoyed, though they tended to be exceptions among longer poems or arranged in sequences.

But perhaps there’s someone we can learn from.  I’ve been reading Ezra Pound again and I’m struck how, as with everything else he touched, he used short poems differently.  He used them not only to break with 19^th century romantic style and with regular form, but above all he used them to teach himself to write more intensely.  His first collections have poems of various lengths but in Lustra (1915), the collection where Pound’s own voice really comes through, most of the 76 poems are short, between 2 and 20 lines, and not a sonnet among them.  He had created Imagism in 1912, apparently in the tea room of the British Museum, and his best imagist poems appear in this collection, most famously In a Station of the Metro:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

which had taken him months to cut and cut from a longer poem, and Alba:

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

These took courage in a culture without a tradition of very short poems like the haiku and perhaps because of this they are carefully worked:  using Metro in the title to draw attention to the French meaning of “apparition” – “appearance” would be simpler and duller; the sudden use of images from nature (Pound said “the natural object is always an adequate symbol”); the sound values, especially the alliteration in Alba and its varying vowel lengths; and the “crowd”/”bough” near-rhyme and use of “dawn” repeating the title to give finality (“alba” means dawn as well as a poem of separation by the coming of dawn).

Not all the short poems in Lustra are serious.  There are epigrams like The New Cake of Soap:

Lo, how it gleams and glistens in the sun
Like the cheek of a Chesterton.

and parodies like Papyrus:

Spring…
Too long…
Gongula…

(in four words, the remnants of a 3000 year old poem by a young man in springtime missing, or being kept unsatisfied by, his girlfriend); and the mock meditation of Meditatio:

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man in the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.

These are written with a care that gradually became instinctive for Pound:  the alliteration in Soap, the sound repetitions in Papyrus, the latinate vocabulary of Meditatio (and its posh Latin title) tied together with insistent alliteration and contrasting with the Anglo-Saxon “dogs”, “man” and “puzzled” at the ends of lines.  Through all the many pages of the Cantos, the care for sound values that Pound learnt writing the short poems in Lustra never left him.

The best, like all Pound’s finest poetry, seem to be poised between a fierce appetite for the present and an equally fierce regret for the past; for example, Shop Girl:

For a moment she rested against me
Like a swallow half blown to the wall,
And they talk of Swinburne’s women,
And the shepherdess meeting with Guido.
And the harlots of Baudelaire.

Pound remembers erotic descriptions of women by other poets and dismisses them, but for me the poem lives by the sound qualities of the second line: “swallow”/“wall” rhyme visually, but “swallow”/”half blown” echo by sound, and “half” has a strange hiccup effect, perhaps mimicking the poet’s gasp as the girl rests against him.  With “blown” instead of “half blown” the poem would be far less worth reading.

Not all the poems are very short.  The Garden starts similarly to Shop Girl, becomes very different and can be said to have 10 lines.  Unfortunately none of the internet versions print it accurately, in three sections with the third and last lines broken.  But I’ll end with another very short poem.  Pound was the first poet to spend much of his time making versions of poems in other languages – French, Italian, Provençal, Anglo-Saxon among others – and by 1913 was developing an interest in Chinese poetry.  Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord is original, not an imitation – an early attempt at a haiku without being hung up on numbers of syllables:

O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.

The speaker, it becomes clear, is a discarded concubine.  She is writing this poem on a fan, perhaps hoping her lord will read it if she leaves it lying about and know her regret at being passed over.  Like many great poems, this works by implications we only gradually become aware of:  the silk, the frost and the woman are all white (in Asia as in Europe, beautiful women were white-skinned, artificially if necessary); the silk, the grass and the woman are wild things that have been cultivated, but only the silk and the frost are cold.  In a poem almost wholly of monosyllables, regret is carried by the cadence of “aside” after the full rhyme of “blade” and “laid”.

Would poems like these win a competition?  They would deserve to, but judges’ reluctance to award prizes to very short poems is likely to continue.  Still, in Magma’s short poem competition, judged by five recent editors, poems of this kind of intensity, with sound values that help create the poem’s meaning, are likely to stand a good chance.

The editors for Magma 53 are both poets who’ve also been practising musicians: Rob played in an indie pop band for years, while Kona dipped into not one but two Music Degrees (in composition and violin respectively), and continues to write and perform music. How have our varying musical backgrounds affected our writing? What is it that makes us choose to listen to music instead of picking up a poetry book, or vice versa? Questions like these have led us to our Magma 53 theme of Music: The Universal Language.

Does language have its own music? Of course it does; “word-music” is what permits an English speaker to distinguish spoken Chinese from spoken Gaelic without understanding the meaning of either. The poet’s skilful application of word-music is one of the things that distinguishes poetry from workaday prose – and, arguably, makes poetry so much more difficult to translate.

Music may be “the universal language of mankind,” as Longfellow said, but it takes time to learn a complex language; Handel, John Coltrane, The Clash and Steve Reich have something in common, but not all ears will find it easy to detect. Music in poetry comes in equally diverse guises. Compare the full-on effects of As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow strung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

with this deceptively casual diction from Dean Young’s Blue Limbo (from Primitive Mentor, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008):

I couldn’t tell the snowflake that foretells
my death from the other lunkhead flakes
that couldn’t scare a chicken, dandruffy
weak blips in the big what huh…

For Magma 53, we’d like to see poems which are about music or inspired by music. We’d also be glad of poems that deploy word-music with brio, or which aspire in some other way to the condition of music. Can poetry do something that music cannot? If so, show us how!

Rob A. Mackenzie and Kona Macphee, Editors, Magma 53

The deadline is 29 February 2012. Off-theme poems will also be considered. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.

In June this year, in celebration of 50 issues of Magma Poetry magazine, and in anticipation of more to come, Magma Poetry launched a new competition.

The entry period for both the Judge’s Prize for poems of up to 80 lines, and the Magma Editors’ Prize for poems of up to 10 lines is NOW OPEN and runs until end November.

All the information about both contests as well as how to enter online or by post, plus the full Rules can be found here

Good luck!

I use the National as an example, as they keep very comprehensive records online, but this trend bears out. Mslexia shows the last seven years with no short poem winners, while the Cardiff International Poetry Competition offers the exception in 2001-2 with Joan Newmann’s commended Carrageen Mousse and the Boy from Nepal which surely must have been a contender for the title alone.

So, the short poem has been overlooked – although of course these figures don’t necessarily mean we’re not writing short poems; I expect, rather, they indicate just how fiendishly hard it is to write a good one. The short poem must achieve all the resonance and reach of a longer poem, but do so with more concision. All its strengths and faults are the more visible in brevity.

I’m delighted therefore that Magma’s new poetry competition will include a special editors’ category for short poemsof up to 10 lines. It will be interesting to see how the short form fares when competing within its own parameters.

The 10-line limit separates the short poem from even the most curtailed sonnet, although to my mind it’s less a question of if the poem turns, as to when the turn takes place.

Poets interested in innovating with form would do well to read Roddy Lumsden’s 8-line ‘ripple’ poems in his latest collection, Terrific Melancholy (Bloodaxe,2011) which are divided into four-line stanzas, some with enjambed verse breaks that make for a subtle and sinuous shift at the halfway mark. He says of them:  ‘They are by nature very distilled, curious little poems – the rules lead you places and you have to struggle to take control and keep them on subject.’

Personally, I’m always pleased to see short poems as they occur in a collection. The white space around the poem gives it a presence and self-containment, and interleaved between longer pieces they offer a breathing space. This is certainly the case in Leontia Flynn’s  excellent Profit and Loss (Cape, 2011), which has a number of 10-line poems, split in half, with the ‘turn’ occurring at the midway point.

I also found them to be intense, enigmatic and cinematic, as in The Dodgy Porch Light, where the ending bristles with a slightly sinister energy:

‘The porch light flicks and fizzes when you pass.

A shadow stiffens when you turn your head.’

Intensity is a factor that characterizes the short poem. Think of Selima Hill, whose thematically linked collections are often comprised of short, image-rich poems that collectively contain a complex cast of characters and relationships. Geese, ducks, brown bears and poodles populate a world of lilac scented lawns, louche aunts, battling siblings and hospital corridors, all held together by a  syntax that is taut as a well-pegged tent.

Moniza Alvi, has also consistently included short poems in her collections which succeed in their ability to effortlessly balance the miniscule with the profound. Charles Simic exemplifies these qualities in his potent two-liner Evening Chess:

‘The Black Queen raised high

In my father’s angry hand.’

I realise in writing this that I come to the short poem with an unconscious expectation of gravitas. Simon Armitage captures this in his introduction to the 1999 Faber anthology Short and Sweet: 101 Short Poems, where he says:

‘When reading through I was surprised by the very short pieces whose subject was death, and have come to wonder if this is because of the short poem’s relationship with the epitaph. Presumably more care is taken when words are to be inscribed by a chisel, when the author has less space to work in…’

Short and Sweet is well worth a look as it offers a stylistic and historical overview of the short poem from John Donne’s A Burnt Ship through to Don Paterson’s minimalist masterstroke, On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him, where the title, fittingly, is the poem.  Wit and pathos find a good home in the short line poem, where single focus allows the punchline to do its work unencumbered by sub-plots and meanderings.

Big themes and elemental motifs also lend themselves well to the small vessel, as in Paul Muldoon’s Ireland, Robert Frost’s Fire and Ice and Edward Thomas’ Snow. While the fleeting moment can be  captured and preserved within the tight frame of, say, a well cast haiku, I tend towards the idea that the haiku demands a separate category to itself as the short poem of short poems.

In researching  this piece I turned to the spiritual home of all things short: Twitter. The poet John McCullough responded with two excellent two-liners:  Ezra Pound’s haiku-esque classic In a Station of the Metro: ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;/Petals on a wet black bough.’ and Thom Gunn’s wry ‘Jamesian’: ‘Their relationship consisted/In discussing if it existed.’.

Jo Shapcott was recently asked about the demise of the long poem on Radio  4′s Start the  Week and she said that far from having abandoned the long poem, contemporary poets were actually wri ting longer narratives in shorter forms via thematically linked sequences and collections. So the short poem can also be a free standing yet  integral part of a longer narrative.

Inevitably, this piece cannot be exhaustive, but I hope it provides a brief introduction to some of the factors that drive the form and some starting points for further reading.

Amongst my favourites is Douglas Dunn’s On Roofs of Terry Street, where a brief moment of illumination is brought to our attention via a builder’s trowel  which ‘catches the light and becomes precious’. It is this moment of transformation from the seemingly mundane to the extraordinary that I believe all poems, long or short, should seek to achieve.

Karen McCarthy Woolf (Twitter@kmccarthywoolf)

Like Ashbery, his poems are basically about his life and times; unlike Ashbery, though they sometimes use cut-n-paste techniques and are sometimes humorous, there’s none of the odd angles and non-sequiturs of the New York poet. These poems are often in plain, simple language, often conversational and personal, with a kind of resigned grace to them that is very appealing to me:

      I don’t know what to do with my arms.
      They fall off the sides or end up numb
      under the pillow. Spiders build nests
      in my arm pits and my muscles won’t
      work in the morning. I don’t know what
      to do with my head.
           (‘When I Sleep’)

Wildlife is in many ways not very different from his previous Shearsman collections. There are the Animals Are Not Your Friends poems, interspersed throughout the collection, which meditate on various subjects but seem increasingly aware of mortality, and there are poems about family and art, poems which may or may not be collages. Rupert Loydell’s world is strangely beautiful, or beautifully strange, but it’s also strangely familiar. He writes about middle-class family life, holidays and children growing up, in ways that make them seem like the freshest of subjects, because there is always the sense of the intangible behind his words:

      Symbols and cymbals glitter
      in the mirrored distance,
      These moments do not reflect,
      do not compute; it’s a good job
      we have email or I’d never be able
      to write to myself.
           (‘Not Made to Last’)

I suspect he’s not as well-known in poetry circles as he perhaps should be because he’s never gone the poetry career route, and his Stride website can contain some very trenchant and sometimes unfair reviews (usually not written by him, though). He’s non-mainstream without being massively experimental, though he is prepared to experiment when he thinks it necessary.

What I like about Loydell’s work is his commitment to a kind of truth, not to experience so much as to language. He doesn’t fuss over his language, he’s never showing off his clever images, or making you gasp as he steps over rhetorical tall buildings with his wit. He can be witty, he shows his intelligence all the time, but he never shows off about it. To me, that’s a great virtue, and long may he produce more of it.

Steven Waling

[Steven Waling's last two collections are Captured Yes (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2009) and Travelator (Salt, 2007). He lives in Manchester. ]

Wildlife by Rupert Loydell is published by Shearsman Press, £8.95)

[for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Wood’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.]
[for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’.]