The Rialto - One Year Subscription by Michael Mackmin

Proving that Norwich’s cultural horizons are somewhat broader than those of it most infamous (fictional) resident Alan Partridge, The Rialto is a poetry magazine that sets its bar perenially high. The formula is simple but effective: exceptional poetry and lots of it. You’ll find a page of genuinely eccentric letter (“Many of what you publish is quite boring, tasteless” moans one disgruntled correspondent), a brief-ish editorial (the ubiquitous wail about Arts Council funding), and, in this particular issue (57), an interview with the poet Lotte Kramer, but no review, articles or illustrations. The poems stand, unfussily, on plain A4 pages, and, frankly with new verse from the likes of Esther Morgan, George Szirtes and Simon Armitage, who needs anything else? A couple of years back Ciaran Carson produced a lively Hiberno-English version of Dante’s ‘Inferno’: here there’s a taste from a forthcoming translation of the classic by Sean O’Brien. And while poems by Peter Lewin and Joan Johnston touch upon life in the 1950s, it is Han Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘Yellow Stars’, a sly, haunting evocation of the horrors of the decade before, that remained lodged in my brain days after first reading it.

Travis Elborough