It was a pleasure and privilege to hear Olivia McCannon reading for Poets and Players. Some of the poems she read were very moving in quite a straightforward way. Others were more oblique, among them “Map”, which I thought I’d share with you. You can find it in the Poetry Library Archives at http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=16823

It isn’t a difficult poem to take in. It has the kind of simple line through it that’s essential if a poem is to communicate when you hear it just once. Its clarity of impact is partly a matter of form. Most lines have three strong … Continue Reading

You can find the text of “Wuthering Heights” at

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

I don’t think I’ve read this poem on the page since the late seventies, but reading it now makes me aware how much it’s been hovering in my mind since then, sometimes quietly in the background, sometimes distinctly visible and audible.

This is partly because it’s brilliantly written in ways we find in many of Plath’s mature poems. It seems to evolve with almost magical fluency. Ideas and images develop in startling directions and immediately crystallise in unforgettably vivid phrases. The voice flows through complicated sentence and stanza shapes that it … Continue Reading

The detail that struck me is me in the second stanza of this poem:

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all she sang there stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

Expressing the iambic rhythm in your reading necessitates almost unnaturally heavy stresses on the first syllable of “Even” in line 3 of the stanza and on “may” and “all” … Continue Reading

Voluntary, by Adam Thorpe. Jonathan Cape. 70 pp. £10.00

Long sentences subtly inflected by metre and stanza pattern are characteristic of Adam Thorpe’s style and essential to what he does. He’s a poet of complex, nuanced reflection, a poet who weaves things together rather than isolating them, who makes you feel whole sequences of ideas taking light from, generating and collapsing into others. The deepest pleasures and illuminations of his writing are to be found in following these long tracking movements of feeling and thought.

Take this from “The Swimming Pool (Kinshasa, 1968)”:

Our gardener would rake its gloom
like a patch … Continue Reading

My feelings about James Fenton’s elegy for Mick Imlah are still divided.

You can find the text at http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=25361

In Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968 – 2011 the poem appears with the dedication “i.m. Mick Imlah”.

The appearance of Yellow Tulips is a major publishing event and there’s a great deal in “At the Kerb” that I admire very much indeed, both for its sheer accomplishment and for its imaginative daring. To take the last point, how many modern English poets would dare write in such an overtly artificial way, starting a poem with the syntactical inversion of the first three words … Continue Reading

Like chemical weed killers, critical principles become destructive when they spread too widely. Take the idea that wherever possible the writer should show and not tell. It’s an excellent editing tool when applied appropriately, and any number of fine poems seem to draw much of their strength from how completely they embody it. We looked at an example in a very good class I went to last week, Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”. But a few seconds’ thought will show how much the field of possible utterance would be narrowed for poetry if “show, don’t tell” were adopted as a … Continue Reading

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