Magma Poetry

Archived since 1: March 1994

Complete Archive

96 issues

Welcome to Magma. Published three times a year, Magma Poetry is a unique kind of poetry magazine. One of our big points of difference is we don’t have a single editor. We value a richer mix of voices, attitudes, ideas and opinions. That’s why we’re led by a group of people not an individual.

Magma publishes outstanding poems by new, emerging and established writers together with reviews and thought-provoking articles about poetry. Over the years, we have championed writers like Seamus Heaney, Don Paterson, Sean O’Brien, Alice Oswald, Al Alvarez, Wendy Cope, George Szirtes, Gillian Clarke, John Burnside and Mark Doty. We’ve also showcased more experimental poets like Tom Chivers, S. J. Fowler and Keston Sutherland.

The trial issue, themed "The Street", features new poems by Christopher Reid [p. 42], Kathryn Simmonds [p. 9], David Wheatley [p. 31], Christine Webb [p. 7] and many others. You'll also find Simon Barraclough responding to Byron [p. 22] and an article on wit in poetry by South African poet Finuala Dowling [p. 32].

Latest Issue:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door
—Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

In our call for submissions, we asked for poems concerned with space, place and structure. We invited poems that consider architecture as their subject and method, and sought pieces that engage with the physical and imagined realms of architecture, the spaces we inhabit, traverse, or dream into existence. In response, we received hundreds of poems addressing different forms of grief, loss, and deep fear and uncertainty. Perhaps it was inevitable: as in Glück’s The Wild Iris, our deepest, most difficult feelings often seek physical manifestation.

Magma 95 consists of poems and writing about poetry that respond to some of feelings evoked by buildings, both real and imaginary.

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