The extreme musicality of Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au voyage”, emphasised by its very short lines, immediately make me think of Verlaine, but it combines musicality with a robust sensuousness quite unlike Verlaine’s delicate, ethereally elusive  effects. In fact it’s above all the sound of the words and the way they make the mouth feel as you say them that makes their images glow so voluptuously in the imagination:

L’Invitation au voyage

Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe à la douceur
D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer à loisir,
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouillés
De ces ciels brouillés
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si … Continue Reading

I’ve just re-immersed myself in the radiant beauty of the Dawn Treader’s voyage through the Silver Sea. Goodness knows how many times I’ve read it, with unfailing awe and joy, as a boy, as a privately reading adult and as a parent and grandparent reading to children. It’s vivid proof of Lewis’s point that for someone who enjoys rereading books, knowing what’s to come doesn’t diminish the pleasure of narrative surprise but sharpens it: you feel the future turn actively swelling within the present moment rather than merely succeeding it. As Lewis says, “children understand this well when they ask … Continue Reading

I can only read in tiny snatches at the moment. Gérard de Nerval’s sonnets have been a great recourse in such a situation: brief, crystalline and endlessly evocative, they’re things I can dip into in spare moments, particularly the ones I know by heart and can think about as I walk to the shops or do the dishes. I have no academic grounding in them and my French is limited so my responses are personal and subjective, but I think in the case of these poems that’s as it should be. Anyway, I thought I’d set out some of my … Continue Reading

I can happily recommend Paul Muldoon’s anthology of old and new sonnets Scanty Plot of Ground, which I read with real pleasure. Before opening it I thought it might include something by Jamie McKendrick. Many of my favourite poems by him involve brilliant reworkings of different aspects of sonnet form. Unfortunately my circumstances at the moment make it impossible to write a piece exploring this. However, I can’t resist the temptation to repost something about one of his poems that I wrote for the London Grip:

Fourteen lines long, like many of his pieces at all stages of his career, “Alternative … Continue Reading

I’ve never warmed to Shelley as a man, and when I’ve tried reading his poetry in bulk I’ve found the process curiously unsatisfying. This is odd: his writing shows staggering verbal power, and he clearly was a man of great intelligence as well as of what seem to me inspiring general principles. Let the psychologist, novelist or biographer explore relations between his genius and what seem like his emotional deficiencies. I want to glance at one tiny splinter illustrating his enormous gifts: not for the moment the superb ‘Ozymandias’, but a line from ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in which … Continue Reading

I would warmly recommend D. M. Black’s translation of Dante’s Paradiso, both to people who already know and love Dante and to those who don’t but are ready to take on a long poem of medieval religious vision. I hope my discussion will show the nature of the work’s contents to people who haven’t read Paradiso in any translation, and that my quotations will give those who do know it already a flavour of Black’s particular style. I’ll say a bit more about this at the end of the piece.

Paradiso is of course the third and culminating section or cantica … Continue Reading

I’ve always found the Lament for Boromir one of Tolkien’s most beautiful poems but the way it’s sung by the Clamavi De Profundis musical group brings out subtleties in its composition that I’d never paused over on the page. Their sensitivity to Tolkien’s expressive handling of a difficult metre has changed the way I say the poem to myself.

Essentially, I think, the metre is a freely handled iambic heptameter, with frequent substitution of trochees (feet of two stresses) or other non-iambic feet for the iambs. The problem with the heptameter line is that it can easily fall into a kind … Continue Reading

The wide canvases of Shadow Reader and The Strongbox embrace many lives, some sharply realised as individuals, others sketchily included in panoramic views. In this way, both books offer many of the satisfactions of fiction in a concentrated and distilled form. Michelene Wandor’s chapbook Ergo represents a very different poetic. My general sense is that moving from Dugdale’s and Dharker’s books to hers is like turning from oil paintings – crowded, impasto canvases in The Strongbox, more thinly layered ones in Shadow Reader – to an album of delicate, almost transparent, semi-abstract watercolours. Most of her poems are … Continue Reading

Many, even most of the poems in Imtiaz Dharker’s Shadow Reader present some form of suffering, cruelty, oppression or abuse. However, they don’t cloud our impressions of these things by pushing the poet’s own emotions at us; presenting scenes and situations in a gently understanding way, with a polished musicality of sound, they let the beauty or cruelty of what they show speak for itself, in all its subtlety of nuance and overtone. In other ways, they’re highly varied in style and imaginative mode. Some offer what appear to be direct accounts of literal events, letting broader metaphorical or representative … Continue Reading

Even on a quick initial reading, The Strongbox by Sasha Dugdale will take the reader’s imagination in many different directions and offer immediate pleasures of many kinds.

First, it works on a remarkably broad canvas. Drawing on the myth of Troy and related ancient Greek material, it’s epic in scale and effect in a way that develops from the work of Ezra Pound and other Modernist poets. Fragmenting the ancient Troy story, Dugdale rewrites incidents from it in anachronistic ways and mashes them up with incidents from other stories in a range of scenarios. Already in the first section – ‘Anatomy … Continue Reading