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

Michael Vince’s generous, intelligently reflective Legwork impressed me deeply. It’s a book that repays careful reading and rereading. I’ll try to say why by looking at some poems in the opening section, ‘Around Greece’.

Poems in it recall short expeditions within Greece, exploring by bus or on foot. They present small incidents with a fullness of life that makes reading them an immersive delight. They make encounters and events we might normally think of as trivial shine with a kind of archetypal, even numinous light while remaining thoroughly grounded in the day to day realities of rural and insular Greek life. … Continue Reading

Both these books consider how Dante’s Divine Comedy has been transmitted to and through later readers but they do so in radically different ways. One explores the poem’s influence on a selection of later writers and artists. The other republishes a single, historically important translation which the introduction flags as ‘An American Voice for Dante’. This republication is introduced by a scholarly introduction and accompanied by interpretative illustrations. I’ll look at both books in terms of what I think they can offer non-specialist literary readers, though it’s only fair to say that the republication of Charles S. Singleton’s translation seems … Continue Reading

Baudelaire uses rhyme in strikingly different ways. ‘Spleen’ and ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ can illustrate contrasting ends of one kind of spectrum.

Spleen

Pluviôse, irrité contre la ville entière,
De son urne à grands flots verse un froid ténébreux
Aux pâles habitants du voisin cimetière
Et la mortalité sur les faubourgs brumeux.

Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière
Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux;
L’âme d’un vieux poète erre dans la gouttière
Avec la triste voix d’un fantôme frileux.

Le bourdon se lamente, et la bûche enfumée
Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhumée
Cependant qu’en un jeu plein de sales parfums,

… Continue Reading

The Windhover

To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, … Continue Reading