Magma 67 Launch

The launch of Magma 67 will be on Friday 24 March, 7pm, in the LRB Bookshop, 14-16 Bury Pl, Bloomsbury, London WC1A 2JL. Guest reader is Richard Price, and the list of confirmed readers includes M67 ‘Selected’ poet Holly Corfield Carr, Alison Brackenbury, Martyn Crucefix, Claire Crowther, Isobel Dixon, David Briggs and more… Entry is free, but you must register at Eventbrite to guarantee entry.

Bones & Breath: Magma 67’s theme, culled from a poem and collection title of the late Scottish poet Alexander Hutchison, is a description of who we all are: solid and ungraspable as water, robust and fragile as an iceberg. Bones and breath are mechanisms of death and life.

It was a pleasure to read submissions for this issue and to choose which poems to publish. No easy task! When it came to putting them in order, some poems which seemed initially to fall under ‘Bones’ came to feel more like ‘Breath’ and vice versa. Ilya Kaminsky’s shattering and humane poems on war and conflict blend immediately into Sharon Black’s girl who wants to be a snail. The terrified characters in Katherine Stansfield’s ‘Fear of Flying Course’ open their eyes just before Sarah Lindsay ruminates on “the price of eternal vigilance”. Throughout Magma 67, very different poems open dialogues and make connections that no other art form could make.

Anyone who asserts poetry’s irrelevance should read Cate Marvin’s astonishing poem and interview for our regular Inspired feature, the six short articles on poetry in times of constitutional crisis, and Richard Price’s reflection, which becomes what it explores: “a straight-up affirmation of a sensibility which continually renews itself, lays itself open, with exhilaration, with vulnerability, to the crammed teeming world”. Magma 67 is a “teeming world” where readers, we hope, will find inspiration, provocation and joy.

Rob A. Mackenzie and A.B. Jackson
(editors, Magma 67)

To register for the launch of Magma 67, please sign up here at our Eventbrite page.