As comebacks go...

The new issue of The Rialto popped through my letterbox this morning, and it includes a short poem of mine, "Because the Beach Needs Sweeping." I had a couple of poems in this magazine about 5 years ago, and they were strange, experimental one-offs, so it's nice that I've had a lyric poem published by them! The editor, Michael Mackmin, wonders why established poets don't send poems to magazines that often - unlike the American ones - unless they have a book coming out. Its a good point, really. I'm not likely to buy the books on the T.S. Eliot shortlist without reading a poem or two from them first. Seamus Heaney won that prize, for "District and Circle." This poem doesn't really make me want to read it anymore than his other books; I just read nostalgia and violence in his poems, more often than not, and neither are my favourite subjects. Mackmin also makes the point that he'd like more political poems - or more poets engaging politically. Its sometimes part of what I do, but I don't think it ever follows immediately from an event. "Was the sequence unknown?" from my last pamphlet, "The Question", was a direct response to the London bombing in both when I wrote it, and its subject, but other poems were more obliquely political.