 Pennine Platform Nicholas Bielby Frizingley Hall Frizinghall Road Bradford BD9 4LD UK ISSN 0303-140X £4 Subscriptions: 2 issues £8.50 [Overseas £12] read reviews of later issues visit Pennine Platform's website Before commenting on this review please read the FAQ page Home page Notes for publishers Want to be a reviewer? Anthologies. Books. Audio. Magazines. Software. Video. Artefacts. Web design by Gerald England This page last updated: 10th July 2004. |
Pennine Platform #53 | |
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The editor, Nicholas Bielby, does not hesitate to include his comments at the end of any work in this issue that he feels he should draw to a reader's attention. Readers may or may not find this irritating, perhaps preferring to come to their own conclusions about the content, but it certainly enlivens the magazine. As Beilby points out the poets come from a wide range of ages and backgrounds, including in this issue four students and the previous editor, Ed Reiss. In the editorial Bielby picks out Brenda Williams' sequence of syllabic sonnets IN MEMORIAM CHRISTINE BLAKE as exploiting the syllabics' strength at conveying the hesitancy of deliberated utterance struggling for adequacy.Equally compelling in a different way is the holocaust poem THE SEVENTH ECLOGUE by the late Miklos Radnoti, translated by Thomas Land, in which prisoners escape from the reality of imprisonment in their dreams Look, my beloved, dream, that lovely liberator, releases our aching bodies.The reality of captivity I am a captive beast among verminis tempered by the temporary release Swish go the dreams, behold my beloved, the camp is asleep, and the odd man who wakes with a snort turns about in his little space and returns to his dreams at once, his face glowing.The poet, however, cannot sleep and sits awake tortured by longing for his lover. The poem is from a forthcoming anthology of the Hungarian Holocaust. We are promised more of these translations in the future. The magazine is the usual mix of poetry and prose ending with reviews, notices and notes on contributors. The standard is high throughout and with the editor's willingness to include the best work from whatever source it continues to be well worth the subscription. | ||
| reviewer: Polly Bird. | ||
| Pennine Platform #54 | ||
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This issue contains work by 37 poets, several of whom are represented by more than a single poem; hence the 45 poems published. Nicholas Bielby clearly takes trouble with his selection, not for him a scant rejection slip for rejected poems. This editor takes the trouble to write an individual response, in fact he takes poetry seriously. Some other editors might well benefit from his example. Poems are often very different from one another, covering a wide range of subject matter and styles, but the language and style chosen is usually quite appropriate for each poem. The first poem I read, for example BY DANES' DYKE by John Duffy, is full of sharp metaphor and has a resonance of language fitting the subject, that of birds, very well. Here John Duffy is describing gulls: A stack of gulls is a tower in the air, a slow mill, turning below a squat cloud, a leather purse crammed with silver, coins about to spill into the sea that always breaks and stays unbroken.Rhyme is rare, but where it is used it is used well. Take SHALL WE DANCE? by Joan Sheridan Smith or Ian Emberson's SONG OF THE DARKLING THRUSH, a thrush's view of Thomas Hardy. I like DEMENTIA DIARY by John Killick, a touching sequence of six poems, which well deserves its four pages of space. Barry Tebb, that rebel of the sixties is there with LEEDS 2002, a no-holds barred poem voicing disillusion with the poet's birthplace: UPON BEING ASKED WHY I AM NOT WRITING Too much gone wrong No muse, no songPennine Platform receives support from the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society so not surprisingly there are several poems that connect with places in Yorkshire and the north of England generally. A BEECH TREE IN LISTER PARK, BRADFORD by Bruce Barnes is one example. But this and other "place" poems have universal significance. There are many poems I admire but the need to be selective prevents me from mentioning more than a few; John Gilham's THE THIRD THING describes a very human mixture of minor disasters and superstition to which we can all relate and recognise. I specially enjoyed Geoff Tomlinson's LANDSCAPE GARDENING AT SIXTY with its philosophical reflections on life seen through the eyes of a gardener and I must also mention Gerard Benson, the originator of Poetry on the Underground who produces some memorable stanzas in THE LAUGHABLE CHAOS. | ||
| reviewer: Ron Woollard. |