Magma 54

A good showing for us again in issue 54 of Magma, available from here. It features poems by Ian McLachlan (co-author of our team-up pamphlet Confronting the Danger of Art), Mark Waldron (who launched the opening salvo in our micro-anthology Pocket Spellbook) and Ben Stainton (who will be appearing in the forthcoming Coin Opera 2).

It also includes a poem by me, alongside the other winners of this year's Eric Gregory Awards, who are a fine bunch that we're keeping our eyes on.

Finally, it includes a wonderful review of School of Forgery by David Morley. Morley, one of the editors of Bloodaxe's The New Poetry (the book that convinced me to start reading poetry seriously), is usually very generous when describing the work of others but also crafts his reviews meticulously, avoiding cliches and trite praise and instead trying to articulate what is unique about a particular poet's output. Well, I would say that. But I'm serious! Here are some choice extracts:

"So intense is the attention to things and forms that every poem in School of Forgery could be described as high definition performance.

Jon Stone understands that a poetry collection is a poetic form in itself ... The whole composition matters. So does every weld. The structure of School of Forgery is ingenious and impressively intricate. Its slotting architectures are slit, mortised and battened.

Ultimately, it's not its complexity or élan that resonate with me but genuine tristesse. Like Mandelstam studying the science of saying goodbye, it understands the heartbroken space between possibility and requital."

I am slightly jealous that, as it turns out, my book got to see more of this year's swifts than I did, however. Maybe next year I'll try to spend more of the summer outside of London.