You can find the poem here.

I’ve just heard Ruth Padel’s broadcast of the Wordsworth Trust poetry workshop meeting on Radio 4. She talked about the importance of line breaks and used William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheel Barrow” to illustrate how unexpected they could be. What strikes me is how much emphasis these breaks throw on nouns. Three of the four breaks within stanzas come between nouns and their modifiers. Cumulatively this is highly unnatural. Moreover, it leaves each noun forming a one-word line poised on the edge of the gap between stanzas – a gap that itself … Continue Reading

You can find a link to the text of “Thrush” here.

Seferis once wrote,

Any explanation of a poem is, I think, absurd. Everyone who has the slightest idea of how an artist works knows this. He may have lived long, he may have acquired much learning, he may have been trained as an acrobat. When, however, the time comes for him to create, the mariner’s compass that directs him is the sure instinct that knows, above all, how to bring to light or sink in the twilight of his consciousness the things (or, as I should prefer … Continue Reading

You can find Seferis’s “Thrush” in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard’s translation here.

The first part of the second section is beautifully translated in a way that generally sticks very close to the literal meanings of the Greek but achieves a natural fluency and force in English that I find quite remarkable. How many writers could set a scene as vividly and economically, with such sensitive use of line endings to space and pace things out as that first paragraph does? And it’s not just a matter of setting the scene with maximum clarity; we already begin to feel … Continue Reading

Everyone says how difficult “Thrush” is and my God it’s true when you try to tie it all together rationally and bundle it up in a paraphrase. And yet for my money only Seferis himself can create more vivid images or strike at your emotions with more devastating power than he does at some points in this poem, even in translation.

Anyway, a poetry lover who doesn’t know Seferis can give herself a treat by going to “Thrush” at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181853 and just reading it a few times.

I don’t want to be intrusive with my commentary but will throw in a few … Continue Reading

One of the things I love about Shapcott’s poetry is its passionate and joyful embrace of the world.

A poem reflecting on this in general terms is “Life”, which you can find here  http://ijcooper.hostoi.com/NewPoems/Shapcott_Life.htm

The speaker of the poem describes three lives, as bat, frog and iguana or hearing, touch and tongue. I want to comment a bit on the last of these.

When a poet writes about tongue and mouth we tend to think of them as organs of expression, but Shapcott’s poem presents the tongue as a means of discovery, a way of receiving the world:

My life as … Continue Reading

Wow! I’ve just reread Jo Shapcott’s Her Book: Poems 1988 – 1998. What a generous, exciting collection it is.

I say “collection” but of course it’s really a selection from three earlier books. Although it seems to me that it’s in Phrase Book that she really takes off, Shapcott’s huge gifts and utter distinctiveness are already clear in Electroplating the Baby. Take this from “Lies” (which you can read as a whole at http://queen-ypolita.insanejournal.com/tag/poet:+jo+shapcott  if you don’t have Her Book or Electroplating the Baby):

In reality, sheep are brave, enlightened
and sassy. They are walking clouds
and like clouds have forgotten
how … Continue Reading

I was introduced to Jacob Polley’s “A Jar of Honey” at a Poetry School workshop run by Helen Ivory a couple of days ago. Here’s a link to the poem:

http://jacobpolley.com/news/2006/08/01/this-is-a-poem/

My first feeling was of sheer delight in the image in the first two lines. I had a slightly mixed reaction to line three – I was torn between thinking what a brilliant phrase and idea “stunned glow” was and feeling that there was something just slightly heavy-handed and insistent about it. I liked “the sun all flesh and no bones”. All kinds of associations combine to make the phrase … Continue Reading

I’ve just been looking again at Yeats’s “On a Political Prisoner”. What a beautiful and endlessly rereadable poem it is. Like so many older poems, it makes me wish I had enough formal skill myself to use set stanza structures properly.

Dogmatic opponents of traditional forms talk as if they were automatically cold, mechanical and external. Rubbish, as this poem among so many others amply demonstrates. Of course metrical and stanzaic forms can be applied in a cold, mechanical and external way, but then free verse can be limp and vacuous.

Yeats’s own famous statement about his style emphasises the link he … Continue Reading

Memorial by Alice Oswald. Faber and Faber Ltd. 96 pp. £ 12.99 Hardback

This is an Iliad for our time, brilliantly updated by the sheer freshness of the writing, the simplification of situations to their timeless essentials, and constant subtle flashes of anachronism. But not “for our time” in any limiting sense. Oswald couldn’t be farther from the kind of cheap topicality that seems alive in the moment of writing and then dates as fast as newspapers go yellow. I think her poem will go on being contemporary and fresh for a long time to come.

Fundamentally she’s transformed epic into lyric, … Continue Reading

We were given Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” in an excellent writing class I’m going to and we discussed how Plath avoids the potentially monotonous effect of using a two-beat line over this length. What we talked about was the poem’s richness in alliteration and assonance. I think that in this poem such devices on the one hand, and syntax and metre on the other, play largely complementary roles. You can read the poem here to check my theory:

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/sylvia-plath/mushrooms

One of the main effects of the syntax is to keep things driving forward. The first four lines all end with strong enjambements, … Continue Reading