Jeremy Page dominates the latest edition of South as one of the selectors of the poems, the featured poet (not, of course, of his own choosing) and with a new collection, Closing Time, reviewed by Joan McGavin among the reviews. This is a good thing. Jeremy's poems are both easily accessible on first reading but intelligent and enjoyable which is what one hopes for from South at its best.Joan's review identifies 'transience' as a theme in Jeremy's poems and that is in evidence in the featured poems here, too. The Avenue recalls the paper round he did as a boy. The best job I ever had was the paper round I did in the early 1970's and so I can appreciate some of what he describes but, rather than reading the racing page of the Mirror like I did, Jeremy took more interest in his customers,
And the curtains are drawn
where Harold Butterworth lived -
he took the 'Soviet Weekly'
and wore a Khruschev hat,
but everyone agreed
he was too mad to be bad.
It remains great compensation for the fact that South otherwise mostly only use one poem from each contributor that you get a substantial few pages from the featured poet and so when it's a good quality selection like this, it helps make a successful issue.
Being selected by different editors each time, there is likely to be less of a house style or presiding taste in the poems from one number to the next but regular names recur and here are Wendy Klein, Denise Bennett, several more familiar ones, and me.
The opinion column, like the reviews that are limited to 300 words, would benefit from more space to express itself. I can see how South tries to include as many poets as it can by tight constraints on words in its other features but Erato probably needs more than one such page for her critique of Post-Structuralism. Don't get her started, she says, on the ways a structure of meaning in one field can have a structure in another so that ...(a poem) about an airport terminal or dentist's waiting room (is really) about purgatory.
Well, why not. Isn't it a good thing if poems can work on more than one, literal level. Perhaps this is not the magazine for such a brief glance at Roland Barthes and cultural theory but, credit where it is due, it's a brave attempt.
Noteworthy among several good, likeable pieces here are Annie Fisher's For Terry Who Asked if I was a Contender or an Also-Ran and Richard Williams' prose, possibly prose poem, Romeo. It is not for me to dispense advice or wisdom like a tutor on a writing course but I think there might be a scale on which poetry can suffer which lies between excess cleverness, valuing the poet's intellectual ability too highly, and excess preciousness, that values the poet's feeling too highly. I might say that, of the two, the poems in South are closer to the latter but that at least makes a change. Good writing perhaps happens when both excesses are avoided but South remains a worthy, and worthwhile, vehicle for some admirable work by poets by no means big names in the industry but good at what they do.
