South 48 includes my own The Book Club Murder as a timely promotional single from the new booklet. It shares a page with an excellent snail poem by my Portsmouth compatriot, Pauline Hawkesworth. Elsewhere there are several pieces to be enjoyed but few more so than the poems by Tony Tanner published as a tribute after his death earlier this year. Two poems on cricket represent his obvious appreciation of the quirky English ritual.
Erato's column raises the question of the prose poem having avoided the larger question of what is a poem at all. I was ready to write my own piece to add to his before finding that he has nailed it for himself,
They are prose because the line break makes no contribution to the structure.
and so although I would normally accept that anything that the author says is a poem is one, the only definition I have is that a poem is 'a piece of writing in which the author and not the typesetter decides where the lines end', and I think he has this right.
What one might say is that Erato doesn't get as much space as he might have liked to explain his idea (for some reason I'm assuming Erato is male; he sounds like it) and the reviews in South are limited to 300 words which is rarely enough. It is understandable that they want to devote as much space as possible to the poems and a questionnaire is included to gauge what subscribers think. So, good luck to them. They are trying to get it right. 500 words reviews and a longer opinion piece would only mean sacrificing a few poems.
As ever in a magazine of this type, there are some poems that are trying too hard. Good poetry doesn't always have to be straining for effect and the poet can put in a big effort that is slightly misdirected only to achieve diminished returns. But for the most part this is a good issue and, having opened with a measured, quiet poem by Louise Warren, Laura Hume and Oxana Poberejnaia are two that stand out.
And so South progresses towards its half century, this time next year, in good form,