Magma is delighted that Annie Freud guest edits the new issue of the magazine. Annie chose the theme of the devil and all his works, and she says:
“I was pleased to find that to ‘speak of the devil’ is still evidently stimulating to the poetic imagination. I was on the look-out for poems that approached it in unconventional ways …[and] I was rewarded with some outstanding poems by poets from the previously unpublished to well known names including Matthew Sweeney, Jo Shapcott, John Stammers and Roddy Lumsden.
The prose contributions include a witty take on Desert Island Discs, Maureen Duffy’s wonderfully fresh description of her first encounter with Milton, and Lachlan McKinnon’s meditative account of how writing poetry can ‘almost trick us into telling the truth’.”
Poems
June Lausch | The food taster of Lydia |
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Susan Grindley | Red admirals and small tortoiseshells |
Tim Wells | The Early Throes |
Nancy Gaffield | Last mango in Paris |
Kerri French | Injured Outside British Library, Amy Winehouse claims to hear devil in books |
Articles
Poetry in Practice: The Book of Emma | Lachlan Mackinnon writes about a special kind of inspiration. Lachlan Mackinnon’s fourth collection of poems, Small Hours (Faber) includes The Book of Emma – a series consisting largely of prose poems, in which he revisits his memories of Emma Smith, a friend and fellow undergraduate at Oxford, who died young from a fall on Lundy… |
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Desert Island Styx | Announcer: As part of our season celebrating The Devil and all his Works, a special literary edition of Desert Island Styx. Magma: Our castaway this morning is somebody who has played a major part in all our lives. He goes by many names: The Adversary, Old Scratch, Beelzebub, Leviathan, Belial, Antichrist, Lucifer or, as Robert… |