In these difficult times poetry magazines come and go quite quickly but while they are going their submissions overflow and it seems that soon they are not accepting anymore. Often I follow links to magazines/zines to find they no longer exist or their submission windows are closed for the foreseeable future.
To find a new magazine is quite exciting and I was keen to read this. Printed on thick card it runs to 22 pages and costs £5. The cover art is from Kitty Copper and the cover quote is from The Cormorant by Daniel Bennet. The overall theme this issue seems to be water and death, though not exclusively.
There are short poems - the wonderful four line stanza The flood by Neil Richards (about Noah and God) to those running over two pages. This issue includes poems about the death of Angels by Jack Little (the dumping of them in a park), The Night That Robin Died by Laura Potts (the sentence structure at times made me fall over words and I had to go back and re-read) - and the poems about water, rather a tide of them (sorry!) including The Sign Recreates the Water by Sue Spiers which I rather enjoyed (nice internal rhymes), At the Lido by Suzannah V Evans (lots of colours and sounds you hear as you swim and rise to the surface), Cycling by Ian Cuccask (the result of a comfort break!) and Wade by Ellora Sutton. In between there are other poems - Crabs by Anna Cathenka (likening each type of crab to 'you', I guess a lover), Correcting a stutter by Sarah James and another about angels which made me smile - The Angel of Revelation visits the New Age Centre by Anna Saunders.
Overall it's a nice collection of poetry stories. I would have liked a page with a biography of the poets, though I guess I could google them.
I do hope the magazine survives. They need readers. It often seems there are more people writing poetry than reading it. Small Press magazines need our support.
1 comment:
Thanks for this post, Heather. Very useful.
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