The Poetry Voice: Recent Episodes

Liam Guilar

Readings of poems from Old English to the present.

Men of the Royal Irish Rifles in the opening hours of the battle of the Somme 1916

Wilfrid Owen (1893-1918)

The last of a short run of poems in which poets use familiar names and stories in their poems.

In the Book of Genesis ,Abraham is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead.
One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home.
Owen’s poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride God offers him, and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem’s effective, as a poem it’s heavy handed.
The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps’ and ‘parapets and trenches’ seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between Biblical sacrifice and the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men wearing belts and straps. I’ve always felt that he didn’t trust his readers to make that link

At the risk of being heretical, Leonard Cohen’s lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac’ makes the same point more powerfully, and more effectively.

John Dressel (b1934)

I worry about my pronunciation of people’s names, so if I have mispronounced John Dressel’s I apologise.

Like Hamlet (see previous episode) Goliath has escaped his story.

Recently a news headline read; ‘Firm wins in David and Goliath legal battle’.

The writer of the headline was confident that the reader would know that this meant a battle between a small firm and a much bigger one. The writer was also positioning the reader to see the smaller as heroic and admirable, and the bigger as the bad guy in the case.

The story of David and Goliath has entered into popular discourse, and people who have never read the Bible know enough to make sense of that headline.

But there’s no reason why we should automatically sympathise with David, or with every small entity taking on a larger one. Dressel’s poem makes this point, playfully.

This poem is taken from ‘Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry’ edited by Dannie Abse and printed by Seren/Poetry Wales Press 1997, reprinted 1998.

Young man with a skull. Painting by Frans Hals.

Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016)

This is the first of a run of poems in which poets use other works of literature or characters from literature to make a point or to consider an idea. Hamlet is one of the most famous characters in the western tradition, so much so that he has escaped his play and lives a life of his own. People who have never seen a version of the play or read it have heard of him. ‘To be or not to be’ entered everyday speech so long ago it may be used without any knowledge of what the rest of the speech contains.

It’s a young man struggling to verbalise a reason for either living or dying.
Anyone can be driven to ask ‘what is the point’ or ‘what is the meaning of life’. You don’t need to be haunted by what may be the revengeful ghost of your father, or suspect your mother of adultery with your regicidal, fratricidal uncle. Once the religious and philosophical answers have been rejected, the purpose of life becomes finding a a purpose that will make life seem desirable. As Thomas says in this poem, it doesn’t have to be a desire to win an olympic medal or climb mount Everest. Growing onions will do it. Only when you have a reason to live, that matters to you, will you fear death, and only having feared death will you have lived.

I found this poem quoted at the end of Tony Conran’s introduction to ‘Welsh Verse; Translations by Tony Conran.’ Poetry Wales Press 1986. I knew of Gwyn Thomas as a translator of The Mabinogion and his reputation as a poet. I know very little about this poem except I assume it’s translated by Tony Conran from Welsh. If anyone knows differently please let me know.

Sunset on a pacific Pacific. Photograph Copyright Liam Guilar.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

I have been rereading Yeats. Something I recommend everyone with an interest in English poetry should do. It’s difficult to think of a collected poems which has so many great poems in it, or where the quality improves chronologically.

This poem sits at the end of his ‘Last Poems’. It’s not a great poem by his standards, but the honesty of it is appealing. Old men are just young men in failing bodies and Yeats was acutely aware of this. The last two lines express an impossible wish but also acknowledge and accept what has passed.
If you wanted to, you could ask yourself which is the more human response: the men obsessed with politics, or the man admiring the girl. You could also ask yourself which one of the two is less likely to start a war.

A Birmingham Screwdriver in action.

Roy Fisher (1930-2017)

Roy Fisher is one of those poets who are highly regarded by critics and readers who know his work, and yet nowhere near as well known as he should be.

This poem is an extract from Talking to Cameras, the first part of the sequence ‘Texts for a Film’. I laughed the first time I read it. As he explains, a Birmingham screwdriver is a hammer, I grew up in Coventry, about 20 miles from Birmingham, and I often heard the phrase. It’s one of those faintly humorous regional insults that abound in the UK, suggesting something about the craftsmanship and craftsmen from Birmingham.
But Fisher takes what is an insult and turns it into a mediation on a way of thinking. It’s the shift, and the humour, that distinguishes this poem.

The poem is taken from ‘The Long and Short of it, poems 1955-2010 (new edition 2012) Bloodaxwe books.

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential.

At some point in his career Yeats had wanted to be a national poet, writing for and on behalf of his country. But in this poem he renounces that ambition, having, he says, discovered that the people he thought we was writing for and about are not worthy. He renounces them for an imaginary figure, a solitary fisherman. And in the poem’s most memorable image, Yeats hopes that before he’s old, he will have written him one poem ‘as cold/and passionate as the dawn’.

You can spend some time admiring those two adjectives, and the effect they create.

Hugh Kenner suggested the difference between Yeats and Pound, or Yeats and most poets, was that Pound, once he’d left London, could sit in relative isolation at his typewriter in Rapallo telling himself he was a genius and dismissing any rumours of negative response to his work as the sniping of lesser interigences. Yeats, standing in the wings at the abbey theatre was forced to confront an often baffled, sometimes hostile audience. It might be one of the reasons Yeats’ poems improved as he got older.

The second of these two poems was written in response to the first.

A.E.Houseman (1859-1936) was one of the leading classical scholars of his day. Today he’s remembered as the author of ‘The Shropshire Lad’ , one of the most well known collections of poems from the first quarter of the last century. I suspect his mercenary army owes a lot to Xenophon’s classic account of how ten thousand Greek soldiers marched to the sea after their Persian paymaster was killed in battle. Hugh MacDairmid (1892-1978), one of the significant Scottish poets of the twentieth century, had a less romantic view of mercenaries. which i suspect might be shared by those unlucky enough to have encountered them.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

Technically this isn’t a poem, but an extract from Beckett’s novel 'Watt' where it’s set out as continuous prose. But it’s too much fun to read to leave out on the grounds that it’s not ‘a poem’.

If you want to tie your head in knots you can try to define ‘poetry’ and ‘poem’. Whatever your definition there will always be a liminal case that challenges the definition. Beckett’s prose is also often a lot funnier than the stern photos of Beckett would lead you to expect. So go along for the ride. And enjoy.

Officers and men of the 13th Light Dragoons who survived the Light Brigade’s charge.

Rudyard Kipling: 1865-1936

This isn’t one of Kipling’s best poems. But it reveals a side of him most people ignore. The incident described here is probably apocryphal. The savagery of the last line depends on a play on the meanings of the word charge. It’s too vicious and carries too much contempt to call it a pun.

The Charge of the Light Brigade occurred during the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. In what is sometimes remembered as one of history’s great military blunders, or stupidities, approximately 670 British lightly armed cavalry charged straight down a valley at Russian Cannons with Russian batteries firing at them from either side. There is no record of any of the troopers saying, this is a really stupid idea…Surprisingly, there were some survivors. It would probably have been quietly forgotten to every one but military historians of disaster, a classic case of bad communication, if Alfred Lord Tennyson hadn’t written ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ within weeks of the event.
The popularity of the poem, taught in British schools for the best part of a century, can be measured by the way phrases from it entered into popular discourse. ‘Someone had blundered’ ‘there’s not to reason why/there’s but to do and die’ even if the quotations were often incorrect.
As part of the education of British children, the poem with its insistence on the courage, glory and honour of the participants, contributed not just to to the mentality that lead to equally disastrous military stupidities in the First World War, but the the enthusiasm for the military that contributed to so many eagerly signing up for that war.
Kipling’s poem, written almost forty years after Tennyson’s is an indirect critique both of Tennyson’s poem and the British Public’s attitude towards its military, which he criticises in other poems, most simply in ‘Tommy’.

This is taken from A Man of Heart, by Liam Guilar. Published by Shearsman books 2023.

Lullingston Roman Villa remains, Kent, England.

Maxim 1History is a record of brutality
tempered by outbursts of idealism.

MemoryThere was never enough light
Even in summer, shade
and shadows contour brightness.
At night, torches and lamps
shiver the edge of sight.
The candle drew attention to itself
while life continued in the silent,
darker ebb and pool beyond.

I remember her hand on the pillar,
a shadow on the white stone.
Her eyes bright in a dark face.
She was worried, there were visitors,
men of power and influence,
come to court her daughter.
Not bad for a freed slave
from the lands around Carthage.
I remember her hand on the pillar,
the light shaking over the mosaic floor.
She had plans. We all had plans.

If you’d like to see the Middle English version I based this on:
Reowen sæt a cneowe; & cleopede to þan kinge.
& þus ærest sæide; in Ænglene londe.
Lauerd king wæs hæil; For þine kime ich æm uæin.
Þe king þis ihærde; & nuste what heo seide.
þe king Vortigerne; fræinede his cnihtes sone.
what weoren þat speche; þe þat maide spilede.
Þa andswarede Keredic; a cniht swiðe sellic.
he wes þe bezste latimer; þat ær com her.
Lust me nu lauerd king; & ich þe wulle cuðen.
whæt seið Rouwenne; fæirest wimmonnen.
Hit beoð tiðende; inne Sæxe-londe.
whær-swa æi duȝeðe gladieð of drenche;
þat freond sæiðe to freonde; mid fæire loten hende.
Leofue freond wæs hail; Þe oðer sæið Drinc hail.
Þe ilke þat halt þene nap; he hine drinkeð up.
o[ð]er uuel me þider fareð; & bi-thecheð his iueren
þenne þat uul beoð icumen; þenne cusseoð heo þreoien.
Þis beoð sele laȝen; inne Saxe-londe.
& inne Alemaine; heo beoð ihalden aðele.

This extract is taken from ‘A Man of Heart’ by Liam Guilar, published by Shearsman in January 2023.

The Venerable Bede dated this event to 450 AD. The British, attacked on all sides, abandoned by Rome, hired mercenaries to help them to fight their enemies. Traditionally, they hired three boat loads of ‘Germanic Warriors’, led by Hengist and his brother, Horsa. On the beach watching them depart is his daughter, Rowena, who will play a significant role in subsequent events.

Their story is told in A Man of Heart.

Michael Alexander’s translations of Old English poetry, published by Penguin Classics, were my introduction to the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. His translation of Beowulf, carefully preserving the alliterative sound of the poem, was a ‘best seller’ in the world of translations.

‘Beowulf Reduced’ is his tongue in cheek synopsis of the story, cutting three thousand lines down to fifteen. It was published in Alexander’s Here At The Door by Shoestring Press in 2021.

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

There’s a story. A bemused reader asked Browning what this poem meant. ‘Well,’ said the poet, ‘when I wrote it only God and Robert Browning knew. Now only God knows.’

Sadly this conversation didn’t take place, and the comment was most likely made by a character called Robert Browning in a play. But it’s worth keeping in mind. There’s nothing wrong with worrying about ‘what it means’ but a better question with this poem is what does it do to you while you hear it or read it. What do the images suggest, the words evoke? Go along for the ride and experience the story before you start worrying about what it means.

The irrational came into English Literature at the end of the 18th Century with the first wave of Gothic literature. It was given substance in English poetry by Coleridge, and you can trace it through the 19th century. Browning’s Childe Roland and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market are two of the finest examples.

Stephen’s King ‘Dark Tower’ series ostensibly begins as a riff on this poem. But if you want a version, then Louise MacNeice’s play ‘The Dark Tower’ does a better job of capturing the spirit of the original.

‘Out out brief candle’

Macbeth Act five, scene five, lines 18-28

Why Shakespeare? It’s a question generations of students have asked. One of the good answers is that the plays contain passages like this where you can enjoy the way a few words can be made to do a great deal of work.

Words associated with time, mortality, the stage, images of transience and futility, all coalesce in that last magnificent sentence to present one of the most nihilistic views of life in English.

Life is brief, death is dusty. There is no afterlife, no possible redemption. If there is a God overseeing it all, he she or it is an idiot. You live your life as an actor in a play, unable to make your own decisions, a puppet of the script and the director. But you’re not even a good actor, you’re clumsy, you have a bit part and if life were a film when the credits roll you can only appear as ‘man walking dog across street’, or ‘girl third from right in crowd’. You don’t even have the consolation that you took part in a masterpiece,. You’re trapped in a trivial story, written by an idiot, and it means nothing.

It's not only nihilistic, it’s also startlingly unchristian,

And then you should remember that this is a speech by a specific character at a specific moment in the play. Macbeth has made bad choices from the start. He is about to be held accountable for them. What better self-defence than to claim he had no choice? The speech may be nihilistic, but the play contradicts everything he says. He’s lying to himself.

Very clever that Mr. William Shakespeare. Wrote some good lines.

Jeremy Hooker. (Born 1941)

I’m assuming this poem was written to commemorate the Hundredth Anniversary of the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916. When i was at school we learnt the statistics; 60,00 casualties, 20, 00 of them dead. In one morning, between 7.30am and “lunch time”. By the end of the battle, which got them nowhere, when the snows closed it down in November, British, Empire and Allied troops had suffered over half a million casualties. While historians might debate the significance of the battle and the actual casuality figures, (57,470 of which 19,240 died). The image of men lined up in rows and ordered to advance into machine gun fire was a dark shadow on the collective imagination, made more terrible by the fact they were fighting in a ‘war to end wars’.

Hooker shows how effective a poem can be without the poet having to resort to distorted syntax, complex rhyme schemes or obscure allusions. The tragedy is summed up …’the old men/that we knew and the young men/we did not.’ He also deftly suggests a difference between then and now in its play on ‘divisions.’ The poem is taken from Hooker’s excellent ‘Word and Stone’ (Sheearsman 2019).

I read the poem Requiem by Anna Akhmatova' on a previous podcast.

Several things made this poem happen. WHile Akhmatova lived through Stalin’s times, many of the people who persecuted her are now forgotten, they are just ‘footnotes in her history’.

I used her poem as part of a unit on poetry in translation. I would tell the story of how, when it was being written, she would write the new verses on cigarette paper. She would show them silently to her friend, who would nod when she had memorised the lines, then they would burn the paper.

Classes often found this most moving part of her story.

But at the end of every lesson, there’d be at least one of the printed copies of the poem left in the classroom, often dropped on the floor. Once one of the papers had a foot print on it.

The poem first appeared in the Irish Journal , The SHOp, and was then chosen for ‘The SHOp, An Anthology of Poetry’, their ‘best of’ collection.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

If it weren’t for the rhymes, this poem feels as though it could have been written by Thomas Hardy.

Kipling could be tub thumpingly obvious when he wanted to be, riding a steady rhythm that takes his poems close to sing song. Here rhythm and rhyme are used to contribute to the way that he suggests a mood and a place and a story and leaves them to settle into the reader’s imagination.

Anna Akhmatova 1869-1966

‘Requiem’ is Akhmatova’s memorial for those who waited with her outside the prison in Saint Petersburg in the 1930s, hoping for news of their loved ones during ‘the terrible years of the Yezhov Terror’.

The context of the poem is explained properly in the second section, a prose ‘By way of a preface’. Some sections have titles, others numbers.

This translation, by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward is taken from ‘Twentieth century Russian Poetry; Silver and steel, An anthology’. Selected and Introduced by Yevgeny Yevthushenko, edited by Albert. C. Todd and Max Hayward. ( Doubleday 1993)

The full title of this poems is: 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal , Dublin, 'Erected to the memory of Mrs Dermot O'Brien' It belongs to a cluster he wrote later in life, and his friends took him at his word, clubbed together and made him a memorial which you can see in the picture.

One cold December day in Dublin, before google maps, I set out to walk to the canal to find the statue. I found it, and Raglan Road which is near by, but that bench seat is metal. You have to be dedicated to sit there long enough to have your photo taken when the temperature is hovering round zero. . You can also hear a reading of 'Kerr's Ass', one of his best poems, on the poetry voice podcast.

Taliesin (6th Century)

There are at least two Taliesin’s. There was an Historical bard who composed poetry in the courts of ‘Welsh Princes’ in the Sixth Century, a contemporary of Aneirin. There was also a character from a folk tale, who gained knowledge and inspiration from a cauldron he was stirring, and after many transformations was born again as a miraculous child who could speak as soon as he was born and went on to be a magician and prophet as well as a poet.

The Book of Taliesin is one of those precious medieval manuscripts which are worth their weight in Guttenberg bibles. It dates from the 14th century, and the two figures have obviously merged. Brilliant scholars have spent their careers trying to untangle the poems, trying to date which may belong to the Historical Bard and which have been attributed to him. Most seem to think this one might be ‘authentic’.

It’s a marvellous controlled howl of a poem that belongs to a very different world. “King’ and ‘Prince’ dignify men who spent their lives raiding and being raided by their neighbours. Enthusiastic cattle thieves. It’s also a world where poetry served a very public function and the poet was an honoured member of the court.

Taliesin laments the dead Owein by celebrating highlights from his ruthless destruction of his enemies. The highest praise possible is to state that he was a generous, ferocious killer. The line 'Medel galon geueilat’ could be translated almost literally as ‘A reaper of foes, a predator’.

This translation is taken from The Book of Taliesin, Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain, translated by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams. Penguin Classics 2020

My pronunciation is not up to inflicting the original on an audience, but if you can, find a Welsh speaker reading the original.

Alun Lewis (1915-1944)

Considered by some to be one of the few great poets to serve and write during the second world war.

This is his take on the myth of Leda and the Swan. Zeus turns himself into a swan to rape leda, and Helen of Troy is born. It’s been a subject in art since Classical times.

Yeats wrote a fine poem on the same subject. But in Lewis’ version the God disguised as Swan is stricken by an understanding of what he’s done. Such remorse rarely figures in either the pictures or the stories.

Two poems, written some years apart.

The modern admiration for the action hero seems like a childish escape into fantasy, until you realise the implications. Real heroism, the courage to keep going on a daily basis where there is no simple victory, no cheering crowd, no prize, goes unnoticed.

These heroics number one is takes from I’ll Howl before you bury me. These heroics number two from Rough spun to Close Weave.

Both are still available from www.liamguilar.com

(A note on pronunciation. There are at least two ways of pronouncing Cuchulainn. I naturalised mine from Irish speakers I grew up with. At university I was told: ‘Oh Guilar, you mean Cah Hool lin’. He said it in such a patronising way, in his bow tie English Accent, that I have stuck with what I started with. )

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

I first encountered Thomas’s writing when I was in high school. naturally, it had nothing to do with school, I found the recording of Under Milkwood in the city record library. Richard Burton reading First Voice ! I was captivated by the astonishing sound scape, and the humour of the script. From there I went to the short stories in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog, an obsession it took a decade to escape. The poems I was never sure about. There were some that were immediately attractive, And Death shall have no Dominion, Do not go gentle into that good night, (both read on the Poetry Voice) but most of the poems baffled my desire for a prose sense.

Your response to Thomas’s poems is always going to reveal a lot about what you appreciate in a poem. If you like sound, they are magnificent. It’s very difficult not to read 'The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ without launching into an imitation of an ecstatic revivalist preacher pounding the pulpit. It took me several takes to escape from it.

If you are looking for prose sense you may be disappointed. If you’re looking for original ideas you will be looking in the wrong place.

The idea in the poem, all living things are linked, is hardly new. But that in no way detracts from the drive of the syntax. This poem is a good antidote to those who confuse poetry and philosophy. If you want rationally argued philosophy or theology stop being lazy and read the philosophers and the theologians.

And if you pay too much attention this poem also seems to be in two halves. The first two quatrains are magnificent, but then the force of the repeated ‘the force that’….is dissipated. If you think too long about the statements in the rest of the poem you might start to ask the wrong questions and undermine the rhetorical flourish. You might even wonder if Thomas, young as he was when he wrote this, found himself with eight magnificent lines and had no real idea what to do with them.

Or you might just sit back and go with the marvellous surge of the verse.

Susan Watson

The Time of the Angels is a sequence of poems in which a young woman reads and re-reads Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur during the winter and spring of 1979. She is researching and writing an undergraduate dissertation, but her encounter with Malory is also a highly personal one; she perceives the centrality of ‘chances, choices, prophecies, destinies, past and future time’ and responds to an atmosphere of ‘loss soaking backwards through the pages like a tide receding’. And there is Malory’s voice: ‘a plain voice, threading beads’.

The Pamphlet is available from https://www.lulu.com/en/au/shop/susan-watson/the-time-of-the-angels/paperback/product-8ddjjw.html?page=1&pageSize=4

William Blake (1757-1827)

For some, Blake is the great visionary poet of the 18/19th century. He had to wait a long time until his reputation and position amongst some critics was established. He can still seem like a peripheral character who became lost in his own private mythology.

There’s an odd sense generated in some corners of poetry world that you have to like or admire certain poets. As much as I admire this particular poem, and it is undeniably a great poem and a fine work of social criticism, I am bored by the majority of Blake’s poetry, especially the longer works.

There was a time I thought this was a failure on my part and I should apologise for it. The result of a lack of intelligence or a failure of critical acumen. But one of the great liberations in reading poetry comes when you realise that you don’t have to like anything.

Think music. There are fans of Wagner who don’t like Purcell, and fans of guitar based music who don’t like The Stones. Or literature, there are educated people who see no greatness in James Joyce and think T.S.Eliot was a fraud. Read widely, dismiss nothing at first encounter, listen to other people and their preferences, but don’t be deterred from the effort to find what you love.

Byron in Venice

(The poet in exile)

The debris of a city in decline slops at the crumbling steps, as the sun sets over palaces even dusk can’t dignify.

The clock strikes, he puts down the page and calls for servants. Suddenly cannot remember if he is to meet the opera singer or the serving maid.

No matter how elaborate the choreography, his hands run free, his mind completes the rhyme. Afterwards, duty done, excuses made, he’ll coax these stanzas to their climax

and scrawl defiance on the blank of time’s indifference, graffiti on the walls of history. He has explored the tangled pathways of his heart and written travelogues for those who stayed at home.

If that leads here, to age and desolation; the fading light, broken on the Grand Canal, where life is repetition, and even lust grows stale; the boys and women he has loved

the friends he misses as he dines alone, faded signatures on bundled letters, locks of hair, old arguments the night returns; if it leads here; beyond the poem, what remains?

An aging face, once beautiful, staring through its own reflection, soliciting an audience to dignify the commonplace as art?

I wrote this after reading Byron’s letters. All twelve volumes. I was thinking about what it means to write, to live abroad, to use writing to organise memory. What happens when a commonplace experience or emotion is written about by a master like Byron? Is there any point to writing poetry?

The poem is taken from ‘From Rough Spun to Close Weave’. Signed copies are available from the shop at www. Liamguilar.com Otherwise available at online book sellers.

Miroslav Holub, (1923 –1998)

Holub lived in Prague, and worked as an immunologist. He wrote a paper called ‘The Immunology of Nude Mice’. His obituary appeared in the New York Times.

He also wrote wonderful poems. ‘Napoleon’ is also on the Poetry Voice, and as with that poem, versions of history collide, and the wit and the critical point will make themselves apparent if you let them.

This translation is taken from Heaney and Hughes’ ‘The Rattle Bag’ and the translation is by George Theiner.

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

It’s one of the superficial oddities of English poetry that the First World War produced an enormous amount of poetry, some of which has entered the Canon, while the Second didn’t. It’s only a superficial oddity,; culture and education had changed dramatically.

However, this short poem, by the American poet and critic, Randall Jarrell, is one of the most memorable poems written in the twentieth century about war. Part of the horror of the poem lies in the unemotional voice of the anonymous speaker. Apart from his position in the Ball Turret, he could be anyone.

The last line is difficult, not just because of the flat way it describes the aftermath of a young man’s death, but because of the way it’s written. It feels like it’s too long. Like the experience of hosing a body out of an aircraft.

As an example of an image being allowed to convey message, without the poet preaching, it’s very very good. If you want an anti-war poem, I’d choose this over something like Dulce Et Decorum est.

Incidentally, there’s several comments online about this poem ‘being about abortion’. It’s not. It’s about the death of a young man in the Ball Turret of a bomber.

You can hear this poem read in its original Welsh at the superb University of Swansea site dedicated to Dafydd and his work.

Unfortunately it won’t let me link directly to the poem:

Click on this link…which will open a new window.

http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/eng/3win.php

Choose poem 82 from the drop down menu in the left hand corner, then click the ‘audio’ link at the bottom of the page.

Luis Quintais (1968-)

You can read about Luis Quintais, a poet writing in Portuguese as well as this translation and four other others by clicking on the link below. It will open in a new page..

https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/15/poems-by-luis-quintais-translated-from-the-portuguese-by-lesley-saunders/

This is a good example of what happens when one fine poet translates another. We live in a great age of translation. Which means we have access to poetry in languages you’ve probably never considered.

This poem is taken from 'Rough Spun to Close Weave'. A listener asked for the text of the poem as well.

After the Funerals

one by one they take their leave; parting without formal courtesies startled by the shock, again, as one by one they take their leave. Affection, understanding, even knowing what there was to value, come too late: gifts delivered past their use by dates.

2

The plane strains upwards in the night, banks, and there, below the city that we thought we knew; drab streets, a park, its monuments, some houses where the welcome meant we didn’t want to leave, revealed as glowing labyrinth: vast, intricate and beautiful. Too late we realise, again, how much there was to learn before the detail disappears, becomes a pool of light shrinking to a faint glow in the skies behind us as we head towards another dawn.

3

So one by one they leave stories that I didn’t understand and now forget, lives whittled back to facts and dates no one contests or verifies. Box brownie photos in an old shoebox? Left trying, once again, to reconstruct a map I never stopped to memorise.

Hafez, 1315 (?) -1398/90)

We live in a great age of translation, and there's no excuse for not exploring poetries other than English. Hafez is one of the world’s great poets, in one of the history’s great literatures, and Dick Davis is one of the great translators.

Ironically i first came across both of them in an essay Davis wrote called ‘On not Translating Hafez’.

This poem is taken from Davis’ ‘Faces of Love: Hafez and the poets of Shiraz’ Mage Publishers 2012/2019

‘Prudentius’, Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. (348-405?)

Originally written in Latin, this poem was part of a contemporary theological argument. This sounds dour, but it rocks along in Martha M. Malamud’s translation.

The section I’ve read here is about free will. Prudentius argues that when God gave man power over the beasts, he also gave him power over himself. The first five or so lines I’ve read here present the point of view that Prudentius is arguing against. Therefore good and evil are choices we make. A man with no choice, who is forced to do good, cannot be good.

The first five or so lines I’ve read here present the point of view that Prudentius is arguing against.

Strikingly, for all the misogyny of the poem, when Prudentius comes to relate the genesis story of Adam and Eve, although he doesn’t name Eve, he doesn’t blame her either. Adam had a choice, and he made it. He choose to do what he knew was wrong. Therefore he, and no one else, was to blame for his actions.

Given the medieval habit of blaming Eve for ‘The Fall’ it’s a striking departure from the normal way the story is presented. Malamud claims that Milton would have known this poem, and and she points out, it’s fascinating to read the whole poem with Paradise Lost in mind.

This reading is taken from ‘The Origin of Sin, An English Translation of the Hamartigenia’, by Martha. A Malamud. (2011) lines 879-957.

Jeremy Hooker (born 1941) I don't often read two consecutive poems from the same poet, but I wanted to hear this one.

It's taken from Hooker's 'Selected Poems (1965-2018)' published 2020 by Shearsman books

Jeremy Hooker (Born 1941)

Shearsman published Hooker’s Selected poems (1965-2018) in 2020. It’s an impressive body of work, through provoking, moving, and very enjoyable to read.

I like the way this poem uses a single, familiar (If you live near the coast) image to explore a complex idea, and resists the temptation to shut down the exploration with a neat conclusion. I also like the way the poem never loses sight of the physical world. The gull and the post are always a gull and a post, carefully observed, rather than a convenient symbol for the poet’s musings. He’s right about Gulls’ eyes.

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

Like many things in Alice in Wonderland, this was a parody, but the target has long been consigned to the footnotes. It is what it is: Carroll’s control of rhyme and rhythm seems effortless. It’s certainly enviable. And the poem is memorably funny.

I’m probably not the only one to remember hearing ‘I have answered three questions and that is enough’ or ‘be off and don’t give yourself airs’ quoted by an exasperated adult.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’. Says it all really.

This reading was a request. Which reminds me to point out that if you have a poem you’d like to hear read on the Podcast you can send your request via the contact form on www.liamguilar.com or to my author page on facebook.

Some poems don’t work well read aloud, and some just don’t work when I read them. I can’t promise there will be no parrots, dogs or traffic in the background, but i’ll see what I can do.

On the website you’ll also find an index of all 159 poems that have been read so far.

Meirion Jordan (Born 1985)

This is the second of two readings of poems based on the Welsh prose Mabinogion. This is taken from Meirion Jordan’s ‘Regeneration/Redbook’. While Mathew Francis retells the stories, (see previous Podcast) Jordan uses his poems to respond to them.

Based on the stories, but treating them aslant, his poems raise the question of whether a poem like this works if you don’t know the story. Or even if they do work when you do know the background.

In the Mabinogion Arawn appears in the first branch. Seas of ink have been split over the translation of ‘Annwn’ or ‘Annwfn’. Though sometimes translated as Hell, it lacks the negative overtones of the Christian version, and in both irish and Welsh literature ‘the other world’ is not a bad place to visit. in the First Branch of the Mabinogion, after meeting Arawn, Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, is able to ride to Annwn where he spends a thoroughly enjoyable year feasting, hunting and carousing.

This extract is taken from ‘The Mabinogi’, (Faber 2017), Francis’ retelling of the first four stories in the collection of eleven Medieval Welsh prose stories printed in English as The Mabinogion. The Mabinogi is the name given to the first four stories.

In this extract from the first story, Pwyll, who is prince of Dyfed, has been told that if he sits on Gorsedd Arberth, a hill overlooking his court, one of two things will happen: wounds or blows, or he will see a wonder. Because he is with an armed retinue he isn’t worried about being struck and wounded. As they sit on the hill, they see a rider approaching.

Although she seems to be ambling past, the boy sent to run after her cannot catch her. On the second day Pwyll sends a rider. No matter how fast threader drives his horse, she increases the gap between them without changing her pace.

On the third day Pwyll himself tries to catch her, and is failing miserably when he asks her to stop.

Gladly she says, and it would have been better for your horse if you’d asked a lot sooner.

Francis’ poem is not a translation, but a retelling that stays close to the original. But he captures the dreamlike quality of the original, and suggests that what we’re reading is both event and metaphor.

You can read a brief discussion the whole book here: here

(Clicking on the link will take you to a page on WWW.Liamguilar.com).

If you want to read a prose version of The Mabinogion in modern English, Sioned Davis’ version for Oxford World Classics (2008/2018) is justifiably famous.

Dick Davis (Born 1945)

Widely regarded as the leading English translator of Persian Poetry, Davis is also a fine poet, as his Collected poems, ‘Love in Another Language’, demonstrates.

In this poem his fluency with rhyming couplets allows the humour of the nightmare to swing. And the humour doesn’t hide the serious point that’s being made, that no matter how good the translator, there must be times when he or she wonders what would happen if they met up with their source in the hereafter. And then, what about the poets you didn't translate?

‘Coke’ in this sense, is fuel for a fire. Thought cleaner than coal, it was much harder to light.

This poem is taken from Rough Spun to Close Weave which is still available from online booksellers or direct from the shop on WWW.Liamguilar.com.

John Keats (1795-1821)

Sometimes poetry is the memorable expression of a commonplace thought.

Keats, more than most, was haunted by the threat of an early death. A dedicated poet, he wanted to be ‘amongst the English poets at my death’.

He died of Tuberculosis, in his mid twenties, a long way from home, coughing his lungs up in a rented room in Italy and he felt he’d failed. The epitaph he choose for himself, ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’, sums up his disappointment.

Amongst the unfinished epics and plays, he’d written a handful of poems that guaranteed his place in any anthology of English poetry. But he didn't know that when he died.

George Herbert 1593-1633

Herbert was a priest, and his poetry has been described as ‘some of the most moving devotional poetry in the English Language’. But often, as in this poem, the relationship between priest and god, is strained.

‘The collar’ runs on a series of puns, some depending on spellings and usage which are not longer current, and which may not be evident in a reading. A collar was a yoke, but also a priest’s collar, a sign of service. It’s also a way of being caught, and an aural pun on choler, or anger. A board was a table, but also the altar. Free as the rode is free as the road and free as the rode (the Cross). ‘Still in suit’ puns on both Still and suit…And so on. He was Donne’s contemporary after all.

Of all Herbert’s poems why this one? For very non religious reasons. It reminds of those moments when study becomes onerous; progress isn’t progressing, time and effort seem wasted and the thought of doing anything that will give an immediate return, no matter how trivial, becomes so very attractive.

Having flung the grammars at the wall, and sworn to never open them again, sooner or later the voice is chiding…childe….calling you back to the necessities of discipline.

Herbert has been the subject of a fine biography: Music at Midnight by John Drury. Penguin published his complete English poems. Mark Oakley’s, ‘My Sour Sweet Days, George Herbert and the Journey fo the Soul’ is a gentle thoughtful non-academic introduction.

Alfred De Musset (1810-1857) The woman in question was not dead. According to the translator, Stanley Appelbaum, ‘The ‘Morte’ of the poem, the Princess Belgiojoso, was not at all dead but coquettishly indifferent to the poet’s advances.’

This is taken from “Introduction to French Poetry’ edited by Stanley Appelbaum, who claims in his introduction that the translations are ‘definitely not intended to be poetic recreations of the original works, but merely aids to the understanding of the content’. In this case the English version seems to stand on its own..

The Archpoet (12th century)

‘The Archpoet’ is the name given to a writer of a handful of Latin lyrics of which this ‘Confession’ is the most famous. Almost nothing is known about his identity or the details of his life.

Imagine a priest or monk, accused of a string of vices. The ‘Confession’ confronts the accusations and gleefully admits to them all.

There’s a debate about whether it’s genuinely autobiographical or a rhetorical exercise, and that is unlikely to be answered. But the poem was popular in its own time: the attraction of saying, yes, I am all the things you say I am and why should I not be, may have been as powerful then as it is now, especially amongst people who do none of the things they’d like to admit to having done.

The translation is by Helen Waddell and taken from ‘The Wandering Scholars’ which is one of the great books about the middle ages. Waddell claimed this poem ‘is something more than the arch-type of a generation of vagabond scholars, or the greatest drinking song in the world: it is the first defiance by the artist of that society which it is his thankless business to amuse: the first cry from the House of the Potter, "Why hast thou made me thus?".( (p.265)

Enjoy.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

There was a time poems entered the language and were recycled in daily usage. And ‘If’ is perhaps one of the best examples of such a poem. It has been voted Britain’s Most popular poem, though I suspect that day has passed.

It’s full of good advice, memorably expressed. Nowhere does it suggest you need counselling or a handbook of excuses. But I can also imagine a Victorian father giving his son such a lecture, and the son walking out thinking, well, that’s that then. Not possible. Can’t do it. Might as well become some kind of debauched failure of a chronic sinner right now.

Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)

(Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L Gill)

For those outside Spain, who read no Spanish, Lorca is probably the most famous Spanish poet of the twentieth century.

This is a very different poem to the ones I’ve previously read on the podcast.

It helps, listening to this poem or reading it, to remember Lorca was friends with Dali and Bunuel. There is a story that when those two were making 'Un Chien Andalou', their ground breaking surrealist film, one would sketch scenes and the other would say, no, that means something, throw it out.

‘Avant Garde’ or ‘Surrealist’ are terms that might be useful as pathways to approach this poem without necessarily being definitive or even accurate as labels.

For a long time I used this poem as an example of what happens when readers are confronted with work they find initially incomprehensible. Read it, I’d say, then come back and tell me what you think it means. The answers were often ingenious. They varied greatly. They were all interesting.

So what does it mean they’d ask.

It means what it says. Images that link without narrative, suggesting narrative, cohering because they linked in the writer’s mind at the time of writing. The links are not made explicit. But the images sing together.

Yes, but what does it mean?

Wrong question.

This is taken from ‘The Selected poems of Federico Garcia Lorca’ edited by Francisco Garcia Lorca and Donald m. Allen. A New Directions paperback 1985.

Christopher Logue (1926-2011)

This is my second reading from ‘War Music’. In the first, Patroculus has begged Achilles for the loan of his armour. When Achilles reluctantly agrees, he insists that no matter how successful Patroculus is he must not chase the Trojans to their city. Apollo, the Mouse God, is present and on the Trojan’s side.

After a day of staggering success, Patroculus ignores the interdiction and chases the Trojans to the walls of their city. This extract begins as he tries to scale the walls of Troy.

Christopher Logue (1926-2011)

A fine poet in his own work, Logue’s most lasting achievement should be his ‘account’ of Homer’s Iliad.

He didn't called his work a translation. In 1959 he was asked to translate a section of the Iliad for a radio performance. In his memoire, ‘Prince Charming’ (p.221), he relates that when he pointed out he knew no Greek, he was told:. ‘Read translations by those who did. Follow the story. A translator must know one language well. Preferably his own.’ It is an unusual piece of advice, and not one usually given to translators.

The results, however, were spectacular, appearing as separate books, until in 2016 they were collected and published as ‘War Music; an account of Homer’s Iliad’. I would describe it as one of the great narrative achievements in English Poetry.

Although neither finished nor pedantically ‘accurate’, it makes Homer attractive. However, as an introduction to Homer its one drawback is that it makes the standard translations of the Iliad seem very dull.

Arthur Golding (1536-1605)

Publius Ovidius Naso (43 Bc-17/18 AD)

Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’ written in Latin in the first decade of the First Century AD, long before England was invented, is ironically one of the key texts in English poetry and Ovid one of its most influential poets. One of the reasons for the popularity of the Metamorphosis after the Middle Ages is Golding’s translation, which influenced so many who read it, including one W. Shakespeare.

The story of Pygmalion lives on in Shaw’s play and the musical version of Shaw’s play, and nothing makes it any less disturbing. It also lives on in ‘The Pygmalion effect’, the idea that high expectations in management or teaching can lead to enhanced results because of the ‘self fulfilling prophecy’.

Whatever the leadership gurus make of it, like most of Ovid’s stories, it’s disturbing. But then you’ve probably met at least one deluded person who recreated a human being as an unrealistic ideal and you might have been unlucky enough to be around to see the damage that caused.

Possibly the most famous female poet in history? Well known and highly respected in her own Greek culture. Her name is still very well known, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. Very little of her work survives, and most of it seems to be fragments.

There are numerous attempts at translating this particular poem: Catullus, Campion, Bunting and others have done their best. I like this version because it respects the fragment and works as a poem.

This is taken from Sappho, Poems and Fragments, translated by Josephine Balmer. Published by Bloodaxe books.

Sorely was killed by a sniper in 1915 while serving on the Western Front. This poem, written in pencil, was found amongst his belongings.

The few poems he had written were collected and published in January 1916 as ‘Marlborough and other poems’. This is taken from the slightly enlarged second edition of February 1916.

Had Sorely lived and continued to write, most of the poems in the book would probably have been filed away as ‘Juvenilia’. As it was, he didn’t get to revise any of them for publication.

He has been particularly well-served by Jean Moorcraft Wilson who not only wrote a Biography but collected and edited his letters and his poems.

You can read more about Sorely here:

https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2017/05/charles-hamilton-sorely-footnote-poet.html

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

‘Light verse’ is often a dismissive term. Light verse can be clever, witty, humorous, entertaining, memorable and enjoyable but Real Poetry should be serious, profound, ‘deep’, emotional….it’s a silly argument. Some of the best poetry of the 19th century is described as ‘light verse’, and Lewis Carroll wrote some of the best examples.

Almost as silly as the dismissal of light verse is the inevitable attempt to find political, religious or ideological themes that would raise it to the level of ‘serious poetry’.

It is what it is.

Carol Ann Duffy (1955-)

This is the first poem in Duffy’s ‘Rapture’ (2005), which is either a book length love poem or a book length sequence of poems which chart the rise and fall of a passionate love affair. ‘Rapture’ won the T.S.Eliot Prize in 2005.

For many people the relationship between love and poetry seems a simple one. But of the thousands of poems written each day, and the thousands published each year, there are very few good love poems. As an experiment, pick up a general anthology of English poetry through the ages and see how many you can find. As is often pointed out: ‘I love you’ may be the most beautiful thing you’ll ever say, or hear, but it’s not a poem.

Because of this, ‘Rapture’ is an outstanding collection, as the poems move from ‘Love’s first plague to her wintry fever’.

John Keats

In Tennyson’s Lady of Shalotte, the metaphor is buried by the story. In La Belle Dame sans Merci, the story is the metaphor. The narrative is as straightforward as a fairy tale, though it also reads like a nightmare.

There are several suggestions as to what the story ‘means’: La Belle Dame is tuberculosis, Infatuation, Fanny Brawne, male fear of the feminine. You can take your pick.

What Keats thought it meant is a different matter. The poem first appeared in a long letter he wrote to George and Georgina Keats.

At the end of the poem he wrote:

Why four kisses-you will say-why four because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse-she would have fain said ‘score’ without hurting the rhyme-but we must temper the Imagination as the Critics say with Judgement. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes have fair play: and to speak truly I think two a piece quite sufficient-suppose I had said seven: there would have been three and a half a piece-a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side-

Which doesn’t sound like he was taking it or himself too seriously.

The poem is also a candidate for the prize for worst editing of a poem by the person who wrote it. When Keats published the poem in The Indicator, he changed the first line to:

Ah what can ail thee wretched wight…

Which is awful. His defenders claim that by this time his illness was so advanced his judgement was impaired.

The poem, even more so than The Lady of Shalotte, appealed to painters in the 19th century.

Thomas E. Spencer (1845-1911)

I know nothing about Spenser except he wrote this poem and I own a signed, 1906 copy of ‘How McDougall Topped the Score and other sketches and verses’. I don’t even know why I have the book.

According to Wikipedia Spencer migrated to Sydney, Australia in 1875 and became a successful builder and contractor, winning government contracts for work on Goulburn gaol, the University of Sydney's physics laboratory and the sewerage system in Sydney.

‘How McDougall Topped the Score’ is a fine example of a recognisable type of Australian poem from the first half of the last century. An entertaining story, not meant to be taken seriously, but enjoyed for the pleasure of the thing itself. It’s also very enjoyable to read aloud.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Another poem in which the poet has taken a story and adapted it.

Tennyson was a great poet, if technique is a criteria of greatness. Try writing stanzas using the rhythm and rhyme scheme he does here and see how hard it is. He doesn’t put a foot wrong if you pronounce glow’d/trode/flow’d/rode to rhyme.

There’s a sung version by Loreena Mckennit which brings out how melodious the lyric is far better than any reading can.

But being a great technician is not everything and for all the memorable lines, there’s something unpleasant about the story which is characteristic of Tennyson’s treatment of Arthurian material in general and the women in the stories in particular.

You are almost compelled to read the poem as a metaphor because as a story about people, even people in a fantasy pseudo-medieval world of magic, it doesn’t work unlike Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. The poem asks to be understood in a symbolic fashion. But precisely what is symbolised isn’t clear and attempts to naturalise it, one essay on the web claims ‘she freezes to death as she floats down the river’, emphasise how unreal it is.

it’s not irrelevant that so many male painters in the 19th century liked painting dead women or that this particular story was so attractive to them. (Do a google image and you’ll see how popular the subject was.)

There are two versions of the poem. One published in 1833, one in 1842. The earlier poem has an extra verse and ends:

They cross'd themselves, their stars they blest, Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire, and guest. There lay a parchment on her breast, That puzzled more than all the rest, The wellfed wits at Camelot. 'The web was woven curiously, The charm is broken utterly, Draw near and fear not,—this is I, The Lady of Shalott.'

which is awful and a tribute to Tennyson that he cut it.

Although it may not have been his source, it’s revealing to compare this poem to Malory’s story of Elaine of Ascolat. The comparison illuminates the limitations of Tennyson’s version. Tennyson may have been a great technician, but Malory was great.

Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)

This is the second of Cavafy’s poems on the Podcast. Like the first it plays off a classical story. In this case it takes an incident from Plutarch’s life of Anthony, and shifts from the particular historical event, when Anthony is supposed to have heard his patron God, DIonysus leaving the city, to a more universal poem about loss and defeat. How should you behave when faced with failure?

The poem offers advice to an unnamed protagonist.

Leonard Cohen used this poem as a starting point for his song Alexandra Leaving, turning Alexandria the city into a human Alexandra and turning the general defeat into a romantic one.

This is taken from ‘C. P. Cavafy Collected Poems, revised edition’, trans Keeley and Sherrard, edited by George Savidis (Princeton University Press)

David Jones (1895-1974)

Why me?

In this particular case, why is this soldier on duty at The Crucifixion and not that one?

More generally, why did some soldiers sign up for the first world war and find themselves in units sent into action on their first day at the front while other, signing up on the same day find themselves transferred to garrison duties?

Why me? What impossible string of accidents and co-incidences caused me to be here at that particular place and time?

This extract from ‘The Fatigue’ answer that question. It begins a long way away in a guarded room. Anonymous decision makers make their decisions for reasons that are hidden, influenced by anything from bad wine, a broken heating system or a cold draft. It’s not personal. They didn’t choose you for a reason related to ‘who’ you are. But gradually the results of each decision pick up momentum. There’s an increase in the rhythm as the decisions move inexorably closer to their final unintended target.

It’s the best answer to ‘why me’ that I know.

A Note on Pronunciation

Jones’s writing is characterised by his use of non-English words. With the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh I’m reasonably sure how close i am with the pronunciation but with Latin I have no idea. Jones was at pains to point out that ‘inconspicious’ in this extract was not a misprint for inconspicuous.

‘The Fatigue’ was published in ‘The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments’ (Faber). I’ve used this version and read the last third or so of ‘The Fatigue’ . In the magnificent new edition of ‘The Grail Mass and other works’ (Bloomsbury Academic) what I have read is presented as a self contained section. In this version it ends

Partee-party, halt. Party-stand fast men detailed- re-mainder- steady! Middle watch-to quarters-Dismiss

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017)

For my generation, perhaps the best known Russian Poet. Perhaps even more visible than the more critically acclaimed Brodsky. Whether he was best known because he was marketable in ‘The West’ or because he was the best of his contemporaries in Russia is, for those of us who rely on translations, an unanswerable question. But sometimes, dealing with poetry in translation, you can be forgiven for wondering what’s being valued.

Not in the case of this poem. Even if it were English it would still work.

One strange evening I took a group from the high school where I worked to Brisbane (Australia) to hear Yevtushenko read. He was tall, elderly, wearing a puce suit and a huge, bright yellow tie. He had just published a novel call ‘Don’t die before your death’.

He didn’t so much read this poem as dance it down the aisle.

This is taken from Twentieth Century Russian Poetry. Silver and Steel, an anthology. Selected, with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, edited by Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward (with Daniel Weissbort) Doubleday 1993.

This is the last poem in ‘Rough Spun to Close Weave’.

Shackleton’s Grave(A Wish)

There will be peace and an end to traveling ,the colour of ocean under a polar sky, solid as mountains, to bear the brunt of storms that can no longer trouble the sleeper in the wind-raked earth. Time will be glacial, patient as icebergs where no rumours whisper, no duty calls, the strong heartbeat of spring and its flowers: the tides’ turn, the snow’s fall.

(Liam Guilar) 'Rough spun to Close Weave' is available from online book sellers. Signed copies are available from the shop at www.liamguilar.com

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)

I first encountered R.S.Thomas’s work in a school poetry text book in about 1975. I’ve been reading his poetry, with admiration and enjoyment, ever since.

In the twentieth century’s three horse Thomas race, I’d back R.S over Dylan and Edward.

Over the course of a long writing life he produced a enormous number of high quality poems. ‘Collected Poems 1945-1990’ and ‘Collected Later poems 1988-2000’ combined run to over 800 pages. Most of the poems, like this one, take up less than a page.

Thomas himself was an interesting man. Photographs usually present him as a wild, wind swept celtic mage, the last of the Druids lowering at the camera or striding over the hills. He spent his working life as an Anglican priest working in small Welsh parishes. He learnt Welsh, wrote at least one autobiography in Welsh, but published his poems in English. Though probably a Welsh Nationalist, he was one of the twentieth century’s leading English language poets. There’s a fine, readable, award winning biography by Byron Rogers; ‘The man who went into the west’.

Many of the poems seem to be addressed to a God who if not absent, is not paying attention, and certainly not responding. The poems are characteristically short, with abrupt, line breaks which look almost arbitrary on the page. Read aloud they lose their jaggedness. Often turning on the precise use of a word, usually containing memorable lines and images, the apparently effortless way in which a speaker addresses the reader hides a considerable art.

Despite decades of rereading, It’s hard to choose an individual poem. I have the irrational sense that if you put the two collecteds together, you might have one of the longest, and most successful poetic sequences in twentieth century English poetry..

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

When does English Poetry begin?

You could argue Caedmon’s Hymn, the earliest datable poem in Old English. But listen to it on the Poetry Voice: Caedmon’s Hymn isn’t written in English.

You could argue for Chaucer, who is readable with patience by any literate modern English speaker.

Or you could go straight to Wyatt. Who is perhaps the first English poet to sound like a modern poet.

He has been the subject of two superb but very different, and therefore complimentary, biographies recently. And there is or was a fine Penguin collected, which may not do him a great service since wading through the lot will remind you of how utterly conventional so much of the poetry produced at the court was.

The fifteenth century is a dead one for English poetry. So you could argue that poetry that is recognisable to a modern reader, both in form and language, begins after Wyatt and Surrey found their models or excellence in Italy. Wyatt Englished Petrarch. You can see the process by comparing this poem with Petrach’s Sonnet 190 which Wyatt is ‘versioning’, it’s part translation, part adaptation, all new poem. You can compare translations: http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy/eng208PetrarchSonnet190.htm

But when you’ve got over the sense of an individual voice speaking directly to you and the striking images, you might want to consider the implications of the metaphor of the hunt as romantic pursuit. Think about what the hunters and their dogs do when they have finally trap their prey. Welcome to the Renaissance.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552/54-1618)

The hyphenated man. During his life he played so many roles, that at the end he was able to look back and see it as a series of performances. It’s perhaps ironic that while his date of birth may be disputed, the place time and manner of his dying could probably be noted exactly.

Even his execution had elements of performance.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

There’s almost a sub genre of poems in English about Ulysses. They would make a fascinating anthology. and I’m steadily adding them to The Poetry Voice index. But in these poems Ulysses is usually heroic or admirable. Most often he’s someone to sympathise with. This poem is unsual in the way it treats its hero.

Graves fancied himself as a classicist. He also had an independent and often idiosyncratic view of the world.

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

A private joke made public? A painful truth? A cruel observation. A neat poem. One of the Intriguing aspects of Yeats’ output is that alongside the esoteric complications and the political and public poems, he could write, and publish something like this.

This is taken from Lady Godiva and Me.

My Leofric is not Tennyson’s. Nor is he, at this point of the sequence, the historical Earl anymore than Lady G is either the Historical Godgifu or the legendary Godiva.

Leofric is the one who stands and waits, hoping his lady will return. Hoping that being devoted in some way cuts him from the crowd, and knowing that it rarely does.

Lady Godiva and Me is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry, from its earliest Roman beginnings to the present day. More information and samples can be found at www.Liamguilar.com.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

The reception and treatment of Plath’s poetry has been affected by the details of her life to an extent that is unusual.

But if you ignore the gravitational pull of the biography and the polemics, what you’re left with is a superb poet who produced some fine poems. Although he was talking about Robert Graves, Sir Geoffrey Hill’s suggestion that great art is produced when trauma and technique are in balance applies to Plath. in some other poems, and in some of her most famous poems, the technique is overwhelmed by the trauma. In others technique wins out and there’s nothing much left.

I don’t know if this is one of her better poems, but it’s one I like for its surreal menace.

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

RTE produced a box set of cds of Heaney reading his collected poems. And once you’ve heard him read them, they never sound right in any other voice.

I’m no longer sure if it’s the poem or my memory of his performance which I admire.

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Reading aloud forces choices on the reader which are left unstated when the poem is read quietly. How does one read the last line of this poem? Is the speaker surprised, received disappointed? On the page they are all possible. Even the best reader has to choose. And for that reason I have been avoiding this poem for far too long.

Browning was the master of the dramatic monologue. And he perfected what we might loosely call ‘performative dissonance’. What is being said, is qualified or contradicted or undermined by the way it is being said. It’s an endemic characteristic in 19th Century fiction, from Gogol to Poe to Le Fanu to James. It’s harder to achieve in a single monologue which has to create its own context. The effect is most famously achieved in ‘My Last Duchess’ where the message the speaker thinks he’s sending, and the one we receive, are so very different. He took it as far as it could go in “The Ring and the Book’ where the reader is presented with different versions of the same story.

In this case the effect is created much more simply, because what the speaker does and says are so far out of the normal definitions of sane behaviour. The problem is how to make him sound believable. If you are paying attention to the first half you can be forgiven for thinking you’re in familiar romance story territory. Then comes the swerve.

One of the familiar critical games to play with this poem is to try and gender the speaker from evidence within the poem. If you put aside the assumption the speaker is male, you will find no evidence within the poem to prove this. On the other hand, that’s also true for any number of first person poems. Browning exploits this common feature as part of the overall creepiness of the poem. (Creepiness is a very technical term…)

I am a life long devotee of the ‘Traditional folk song’. This poem is dedicated, without irony, ‘For the Ballad singers, with gratitude and affection.’

But I don’t like Broken Token Songs, even if some of them have the best tunes.

In this particular sub set of the folk genre, a girl, we shall call her Sweet Dotty, is usually walking in her garden, or down by a river, when a stranger arrives and propositions her. She says she is waiting for Sweet William to return from the wars, from sea, and she will be faithful to his memory. Having told the girl various lies, the stranger then reveals himself as the missing William. They produce their ‘broken tokens’ and live happily ever after.

The back story here is that before Sweet William went off to the war, set sail to make his fortune or was press ganged, he and Dotty broke a token, a ring or a coin, in two and each kept a half, so that when the battered and disfigured male returned he could prove who he was.

What I don’t like about broken token songs is the implication that it’s ok for the guy to have gone off and had all sorts of adventures but the girl must remain chaste and true. I know this goes back to the Odyssey and I know it’s cultural, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. So I wrote my own version.

If you don’t see the man in the door’s stories and language as utterly inappropriate, and see what that suggests about him, then I can’t help you.

This poem is published in ‘Rough Spun To Close Weave’ by Ginninderra press. Available from all online sellers, details at www.liamguilar.com

Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

This poem makes an interesting contrast with Louise MacNeice’s Thalassa. The poet may be an experienced sailor (Bunting was) and he may be talking to his boat, but there’s a sense of defeat here lacking in MacNeice’s poem.

The epigraph to this poem is ‘Perche no Spero’, because there is no hope, which I left out of the reading for no other reason than I forgot to read it.

John Agard (1949-)

My first encounter with John Agard’s poetry was his collection ‘Love Lines for a Goat-Born Lady’.

I don’t know if I’d read Grace Nichols first and then read John Agard because they were married or if it were the other way round and it really didn’t matter. They were both eye opening.

When 'Milk and Honey’ by Rupi Kaur recently went mega on the best seller lists, journalists tied themselves in knots trying to explain the book’s baffling popularity. It was direct. it was immediate, It was not ‘dusty’.

Made me wonder where the journalists had been for the past fifty years or so. Or what kind of poetry they were reading. They had certainly not been reading John Agard, or Grace Nichols, or a list that's too long to fill out.

You can be direct and immediate and intelligent. You can also be witty and make a political point without resorting to political slogans while you’re doing it. If you don’t believe me go read John Agard or Grace Nichols.

John Clare (1793-1864)

Clare is one of the contested figures in the ‘Romantic Movement’. He has the credentials, a farm labourer, his nature poetry was based on detailed observation of the world around him, he was mostly self educated and he ended his life in what was then called a lunatic asylum.

But his poetry sits awkwardly against his more well known and better connected peers. His ‘nature poetry’ reads like the product of man who had lived and worked in the landscapes he described. Attempts to claim he is a central figure in the period have to overcome the facts. His biography is worth reading for an insight into the reality of poetry in the Romantic period.

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting proposition. If it’s one of your favourites, and you don’t like my reading, I apologise.

Paradoxically, the poem works so well because although it mentions specific places, you’d never know who the Irish Airman was or in which war he was fighting from the poem alone. It’s this delicate mix of the general and specific, combined with Yeats’ superb phrase making, that makes the poem so effective.

If you’re interested in technique you should compare this poem with its companion piece, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ written for the same Irish Airman.

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

Peter McDonald printed this as as the last poem in his edition of MacNeice’s ‘Collected poems’. It has an attractive combination of elegy and defeat and determination.

Thalassa is the Greek word for the sea. For a classicist like MacNeice, it’s overloaded with connotations. From Xenaphon and his ragged army, desperately trying to get home, to the image of ageing Ulysses, pushing out on one more journey.

This is taken from McDonald’s beautiful edition of MacNeice, ‘Collected poems’ Faber and Faber, 2007

Rumplestiltskin.

This is my favourite story told by the Grimm brothers. Their version is a masterpiece of narrative economy. If you’ve read the earlier French version you can only admire how much has been stripped out by the time they got to it.

Like most folk stories it won’t survive logical scrutiny, but it moves so swiftly you don’t have time to stop and consider how strange it is, or how inconsistent when you’re going along with the story.

So here is the Ugly Little Man, Rumplestiltskin himself, the only one who doesn’t change in a story about transformations, a three time failure in a story of threes, perhaps feeling a little sorry for himself, or just rightfully indignant. As he says: ‘I saved her life three times/she never once asked me my name’.

Percy Shelley (1792-1822)

Change the date, or change country and date. Some things don’t change much. Though the hopeful ending is getting harder to believe in.

It was Shelley who claimed that Poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. If he really believed such mellifluous waffle he was delusional. He may have been outraged by the Peterloo Massacre, but sitting in his garden in Italy, writing this sonnet which wasn’t published til 1839 didn’t help the families of the poor or make any kind of change to Government policy.

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

One of the glories of English poetry, or poetry in English, is the short lyric. There are thousands of them, and some of them, like this one, are excellent. A memorable statement of a commonplace idea which is not undermined by the knowledge that the poet probably got bored of the original addressee and tried the poem out on someone else.

When Richard Tottel printed the first anthology of poetry in English, in 1557, he was almost apologetic about publishing short poems. When poetry was conscripted into the university at the beginning of the twentieth century, the professional critic needed something to write about, and it is far easier to write 40.000 words on the implication of water imagery in the waste land than it is to say anything clever about ‘A red red Rose’. So the short lyric tends to be absent in the classroom.

But its strength lies in its ability to state the well-known and familiar in strikingly memorable ways. When done well it is the most immediately pleasurable of poems. The excellent ones sing themselves.

Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984)

One of the most popular English language poets of the twentieth century. His collected poems sold over two million copies.

One of the nastier assumptions about modern poetry is that it’s not possible to be popular and good. Great poets have five readers and an academic following. Popular poets have either no talent or have prostituted themselves to find an audience. As an assumption it’s both nasty and dangerous.

Betjeman was popular and good. Some of his poems, like this one, seemed to be set in a world that wasn’t on the same planet as mine. His excellence is technical. No modernist pyrotechnics, just a deft handling of the formal aspects of rhyming verse.

His autobiography, ‘Summoned by Bells’ written in blank verse, is one of the better long poems of the century.

The first line of this poem has been stuck in my head since I read it in a high school text book.

George Gascoigne (1535-1578)

I know very little about George Gascoigne, and looking him up on line hasn’t added much to that. But I do like this poem for its combination of weary resignation and sly humour.

And poems like this are the reason why good anthologies are so valuable. I found this one in Seven Centuries of Poetry in English, edited by John Leonard. A lot can be said against anthologies, but a good one, like Seven Centuries, is a great place to start if you’re curious about poetry written in other times or want to read something by famous poet x without wading through x’s complete poems. And in a good anthology, nestled beside famous poet x’s well known poem, will be a poem by someone you’ve never heard of, which you wouldn’t have otherwise found.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

The ‘Greek Version’, which is the ‘historical version’ is that in 490 BCE, the citizens of Athens and some allies defeated a numerically superior Persian army at Marathon. In doing so they stopped the first Persian attempt to conquer Greece. Marathon became a symbol of small nations fighting for freedom against overwhelming odds.

Graves was having fun imagining the Persian Version of events.

It may not be funny in a world where armies can advance towards the rear, where an American president can talk about ‘a down draw’ in Iraq, or where our political leaders think their version or events is superior to any other, regardless of any inconvenient facts that might prove they are wrong.

Liam Guilar

The most frightening ghost stories I’ve encountered were told around the table by my English Grandmother and my Irish Father. There was no attempt to ‘be frightening. They both believed in the truth of the stories they were telling.

This one scared me most because it didn’t finish. It seemed to be all detail and no story. Years later, when I remembered to ask her what was under the floorboards, the answer was long and involved and didn’t seem to belong to this story.

The poem is taken from ‘Rough Spun to Close Weave’ (Ginninderra press 2012). You can find other samples from the book at www.liamguilar.com.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

Student: Sir! Is he trying to get her clothes off….? Me:…. Student: It’s not gonna work is it?

If it’s not surprising that so many English poems seem to have a speaker, usually male, addressing someone, usually female, and trying to get them to undress, what is remarkable is how many of those speakers are doomed to failure if the poem is all they’ve got.

And this is one of the most famous examples. Was any woman ever seduced by being told; ‘You’ll be dead soon, in the grave, and the worms will be chomping on those body parts I’m currently obsessed by. So get your clothes off’?

Which should make readers stop and realise that rather than an imagined speech, this is a rhetorical exercise. It moves very logically in three parts: If… However…Therefore. This is a poet giving a virtuoso performance. Creating brilliant phrases, memorable images, but not creating a speech that could be delivered to a human being to bring about a desired outcome.

However, even as a rhetorical exercise, it’s disturbing. It's like an attempt at a clever joke that's gone a bit sour. If you pay attention, not only do the images seem inappropriate or disturbing, but the therefore seems to have slipped ….the poem begins with : ‘I want you’ as its purpose, but by the end the speaker’s purpose is to cheat time and his mistress is just a means to that end.

Marvell’s biographer could find no evidence for a mistress. Make of that what you will.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Form became a fetish in some kingdoms of poetry world in the later twentieth century. Creative writing students practised Sestinas and Villanelles, and some of them produced technically proficient examples. Most of them were immediately forgettable, and if you enjoy trivial pursuits a good question is 'Name three great villanelles written in the twentieth century'.

What the festishists ignored, forgot or didn’t know what that form is never the whole story. You can teach an 11 year old to write a technically flawless sonnet but your chances of it being memorable are almost non-existent.

This is a great poem, regardless of Thomas’ choice of form. You can always criticise him for being excessive with the adjectives, and he obviously didn’t care for Bunting’s ‘Cut out every word you dare’. But there are few poets who are so enjoyable to read aloud. Even when sense is slipping out the back door for a quiet pint in the pub.

And don’t be fooled by the music of it. This is very clever in a subtle and unobtrusive way. As someone said, there is no true repetition in poetry….Good night is both a night that is a good, a euphemism for death, and a parting statement. You can exhort someone to rage, or they can rage.

This is taken from a very tatty, yellowing Aldine Paperback ‘Collected Poems 1934-1952’ which I bought in a bookshop in Bala in April 1976

Robert Service (1874-1958)

You could turn your nose up at Robert Service and his poems. He called them verse, poetry was something other people wrote. He pads his lines, he isn’t afraid to use a cliche when it fits, and the rhythm often seems to be only on nodding terms with the sense. He’s old fashioned. Out of date. etc etc.

And this poem is haunted by the ghost of a much greater one.

But turning your nose up at Service is just silly. His poems were written to be recited, and reading them aloud is a very real pleasure.

Like ‘The Shooting of Dan Mcgrew’, the Cremation is a tightly written short story. The narrative keeps to the trajectory of folklore anecdote it’s meant to be. We’re promised a tale about something strange and unusual. A man makes a dying wish, his friend promises to grant it. He struggles to keep his promise but does. And then the tale twists, famously, at the end to deliver on the story teller's promise at the start.

This is taken from The Complete Poems of Robert Service, though it first appeared in ‘Songs of a Sourdough’.

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

One of the underrated poets of the twentieth century. A fine critic, an entertaining writer of prose and a fine poet, (unfairly I think) overshadowed in the history books by his friend W.H. Auden.

Perhaps his reputation also suffers because although Irish, he lived most of his life in England. So he misses out on the club value of ‘Irish Poet’ while remaining outside the charmed circle of “English Poets’.

This is not one of the poems I’d offer as proof of his excellence, but it’s one I like. The cosmic indifference of the universe: he was too early, she was too late.

This is taken from Peter MacDonald’s Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, revised for Faber in 2007 for the centenary of his birth. This poem also appears in Michael Longley’s selection of MacNeice’s verse in Faber’s poet to poet series.

Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

Nasty little words, nasty long words, it's unhealthy. I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts, all delinquents. What you write is rot.

You can enjoy this poem as a joke, or as a caricature of a very common attitude towards poetry. Writing is not work in the way being a bus conductor is work, and if the ten year old son can do it and rhyme, and the school teacher thinks that the poetry isn’t good, and after all, school teachers know about this stuff, what claim does the poet have to any type of excellence, let alone any financial reward.

But beyond the grim humour is something else: the issue of public funding for the arts, and poetry especially. The Chairman, for all his bluster, has a point, or a series of points. And if instead of dismissing him as an uneducated and unsympathetic whatever, you try and refute or answer his points, you might find the exercise not as straight forward as it seems.

I’ve always assumed the Tom In Question is Tom Pickard but I have no evidence for believing that. This is taken from the excellent Bloodaxe edition of Bunting's Complete poems.

Andy Brown

This is taken from Brown’s sequence ‘Casket’ (Shearman 2019). The casket in question is the Franks Casket, an 8th century Whale bone box currently in the British Museum. What pictures of the Box don't do is show how small the thing is, or how intricate the carving.

The Anglo-Saxons were blessed with superb craftsmen. If you get the chance, go see the box in the British Museum, or some of the finds from the ‘Staffordshire Hoard’ and while you’re standing there remind yourself: no strong artificial light, no magnifying lens, no glasses.

Brown’s sequence consists of five parts, one for each side panel and one for the lid. Each part is broken into unnumbered sections, and the reading here is of parts one, four and five of the final section. The /I/ speaking at the beginning is the craftsmen, but his voice blurs into the voice of the box. The speaking object is a familiar device in Old English Poetry.

You can read more about ‘Casket’ here: http://www.liamguilar.com/enthusiasms/2019/6/17/casket-by-andy-brown

John Milton (1608-1674)

This is the third of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’.

This is from Book Twelve, line 624 ff. It’s the end of the poem.

Although Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise, they turn towards their future and the world is, literally, ‘all before them’. Although this is their punishment, it doesn’t sound like it. True they are banned from Paradise, but the poem escapes the theology and it sounds more like the start of a magnificent shred adventure, or the early days of a marriage.

And that’s enough Miton for a while.

John Milton (1608-1674)

This is the second of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’.

This is from Book Nine, line 421 ff

Satan has escaped from Hell and found Adam and Eve. In this extract he finds Eve alone in the Garden. The extract includes one of my favourite moments in English Poetry (I have a lot of favourite moments) when Satan is made ‘Stupidly good’ by the sight of Eve.

It also contains some fine examples of the unusual way in which Milton dealt with English Syntax. Here’s one sentence:

He sought them both, but wished his hap might find Eve Separate: he wished, but not with hope Of what so seldom chanced, when to his wish Beyond his hope, Eve separate he spies, Veiled in a cloud of fragrance, where she stood Half spied, so thick the roses bushing round About her glowed, oft stooping to support Each flow’r of slender stalk, whose head though gay Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold, Hung drooping unsustained: them she upstays Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while, Herself, though fairest unsupported flow’r From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh.’

If you're reading paradise Lost for the first time, you need to be patient. The syntax does become familiar and the poem is worth the effort it requires.

John Milton (1608-1674) This is the first of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’. This is from Book One, lines 242-270

The story begins with the fallen angels in Hell. In this brief excerpt Satan has emerged from the lake of fire into which he was cast down. He steps on to dry land, and surveying hell, his prison and the proof of his defeat, rebrands it as his kingdom.

There are many ways in which you could write a history of English poetry. You could study left handed poets throughout history, which would make selection of poems easy as it wouldn’t matter if they were good poems as long as their authors were left handed.

Or you could study it as the history of a practice, with significant practitioners and products. You’d have to consider why some were highly praised, and some forgotten, but in such a history Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ is an essential work of English Poetry.

You may find his God repellent and very tedious and you may object to Milton’s theology or his views on marriage. You will struggle at times with his diction and his syntax. You might agree with Samuel Johnson that “'Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is". But I think Johnson was wrong when he continued: ‘Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure’.

It is a magnificent work. Milton’s Satan is one of the great characters in English Literature and the poem Is veined with great and memorable passages. if you read it aloud, you can not only hear Shakespeare in the background, but you can also hear Tennyson’s Ulysses. A history of poetry as practice would consider poets reading poets, poems responding to poems. The way a sound is taken up and passed on.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

A poem in three movements. In the first, Eliot catches the grumbling voice of a man unaccustomed to hard travelling, remembering the uncomfortable details of a preposterous journey. In the second, the Magi find what they thought they were looking for ‘and it was (you may say) satisfactory’. And in the third the speaker acknowledges the ambiguity of that experience, which marked the end of ‘the old dispensation’ and left him stranded between a death and a birth.

From Caedmon to the beginning of the Twentieth century, a poet writing in English could assume a shared Christian background with 99 percent of potential readers. I stopped using this poem in class a few decades ago. It wasn’t that the white horse, three crosses and dicing men were too obscure, or even that the word Magi was unfamiliar. The event at the centre of the poem, which the speaker assumes is well-known and therefore doesn’t need to be described in any detail, had to be explained.

This poem is taken from T.S.Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

An obvious choice for the season.

Perhaps better known as the Carol, ‘In the Bleak Mid Winter’. It’s interesting attempting to read this while trying to ignore the familiar cadence of the sung version.

This is taken from the Penguin Classics ‘Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems’.

‘Lady Godiva and Me’ is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry.

My idea was that anyone who stood on a street corner in the city could imagine the swirling voices of all the people who had lived there since the city was first founded.

In the first section, ‘History to Legend’, the voices of Leofric, Godgifu/Godiva and Peeping Tom can be heard. Here’s Peeping Tom, unapologetic, speaking for himself.

You can read more samples on www.liamguilar.com

A revised second edition of the book is now available from Amazon, the Book Depository, or from the shop on www.liamguilar.com

‘Lady Godiva and Me’ is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry.

The idea was that anyone who stood on a street corner in the city, could imagine the swirling voices of all the people who had lived there since the city was first founded.

The second part of the sequence, called ‘The Modern City’ suggests the voices of the migrant communities that made the city after the second world war. This is a small sample from that section.

You can read more samples on www.liamguilar.com

A revised second edition of the book is now available from Amazon, the Book Depository, or from the shop on www.liamguilar.com

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

‘The best lack all conviction’: It’s not always true, but there are times, like the present, when it does seem accurate. And though Yeats wrote this after the First World War, the poem seems to rediscover its own topicality as each generation faces the baffling reality of its own political misery.

I wrote on a previous podcast that Yeats is the unavoidable English language poet. He was so very good at what he did. He wrote better lines, better images, better stanzas and better short poems than almost anyone else, and he did it more often.

Try replacing ‘slouching’ in the final line with a different verb and watch what happens, to both the sound and sense.

If you're interested in Yeats the man, he is the subject of a superb two volume biography by Roy Foster: 'W.B. Yeats a life'. Vol I: The Apprentice Mage, Vol 2 The Archpoet.

Thom Gunn (1929-2004)

‘I have been reading my contemporaries’

This is the first year since I started school when I have not been obliged to read anything.

So I have been catching up on what is considered admirable in Contemporary poetry. I have read award winning books, and books by famous poets, and that odd thing, the popular poetry book.

And while some of it is excellent, this poem has been running through my head.

Gerald Manley Hopkins (1884-1889)

There was a time Hopkins featured on school lIterature syllabi. He may still do. He was often the first shocked encounter students had with a poet who was ‘difficult’. Generations floundered attempting to write something intelligent about something they found incomprehensible.

They could of course get technical and try reading about ’sprung rhythm’, though that may have left them even more confused than before. They could delve into the biography and consider how Hopkins’ spirituality affected the poems. Either way they were moving further away from the object they were supposed to be considering.

I think it’s better to wander through his poems, looking for ones that catch your attention. Rereading them allows you to tune into others. This does not mean you’ll soon be reading ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and enjoying the experience, but it will allow you to enjoy some of his poems.

This one celebrates the glorious multiplicity of creation. What is there to not understand?

This poem is taken from the Folio Society’s beautiful Selected poetry and Prose of Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Hugo Williams (1942-)

I have admired William’s poetry since I discovered that the author of “No Particular Place to Go'“ wrote poems. My copy of that strange excursion into America has 1983 written inside the cover as its date of purchase. This poem is taken from his most recent collection, ‘Lines Off’ (Faber 2019).

Most discussions of Williams’ poetry will sooner or later discuss the art of artlessness. In a world of pyrotechnics and syntaxtic acrobatics, written by earnest survivors of unimaginable horrors, domestic or national, on a first reading, the Williams poem can seem little more than rhythmically organised speech. The fact the speaker is so often unimpressed with itself can encourage the illusion. How nice you think, and pass on in search of something more substantial.

And that’s your mistake.

A simple test of excellence is to watch what happens when you reread the poem. As with this one, so much more is happening than appears on that first, swift reading.

James Laughlin (1914-1997)

I knew very little about Laughlin except that he founded New Directions Publishing after Pound had told him ‘to do something useful’. I think this poem is a ‘version’ of a Latin poem by Propertius rather than a strict translation.

I’ve taken it from ‘World Poetry’ edited by Washburn and Major where the poem’s title is followed by:

(After the Pervigilium Veneris and Propertius’s ‘Nox Mihi Candida’.)

Centuries after the originals were created, I suspect most people might recognise the sentiment.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

‘For us there is only the trying, the rest is not our business’.

Eliot’s disenchanted view of writing poetry probably sounds familiar to anyone who is serious about practising the craft. It’s full of quotable phrases. Writing poetry as a ‘raid on the inarticulate’ is perhaps the best description of the process that I know.

This is only an extract. I would like to admire Four Quartets as a whole but I think it’s very uneven. It contains beautiful lines and images, profound thoughts, and then it clunks into bad prose or obscurity. I suspect you can split Eliot devotees into those who admire everything, and those who admire the early work.

Even in this extract ‘For us there is only the trying, the rest is not our business’ sounds magnificent but won’t sustain any prolonged consideration. Eliot was Banker, Critic, publisher and editor. He did a lot more than try to write poetry, and today the poet who thinks he or she can avoid all the trappings of ‘poeting’ and get by simply trying to write better poems is probably deluded.

This is taken from 'The complete poems and plays 1909-1950'.

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

One of those poems that doesn’t date, that stays relevant?

Ralegh or Raleigh, take your pick. The ultimate hyphenated man of the Elizabethan Renaissance. And nowhere does the gap between what the poems claim and what the poet did in his day job seem greater: this was the man who took part in the massacre at Smerwick. But he set off in tiny ships to sail to America, flamboyant Courtier, Royal Favourite, Brutal soldier, Poet, scholar, patron of poets, falling out of Royal favour with James, and despite his failure to find El Dorado, sailing home knowing home meant execution. Even his death seems emblematic of the end of an age.

‘The Lie’, also called ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’s farewell’, ‘The Soul’s errand’ and ‘Satyra volans’ is dated to the 1590s, and circulated in manuscript. Apparently there are replies to it. It’s not the poem Sir Walter wrote in the tower, waiting to have his head removed from his shoulders.

This version is taken from the excellent ‘The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse’ 1509-1659: selected and introduced by David Norbrook and edited by H.R. Woudhuysen (2005) For anyone with any interest in the poetry of this period, the preface and introduction are an education and the selection goes far beyond the usual suspects.

John Dryden (1631-1700)

Dryden's poetry sits uncomfortably between the ease of the Renaissance and the familiarity of the Romantics. Like Pope he was a superb poet, a master of the heroic couplet, like Pope and Swift a master of the devestating put down, and like Pope, brevity was not his strong point.

But here he is laying into Thomas Shadwell, crowning him the King of Dullness. You have to go along for the ride. Some of the names will be unfamilair, some of the references will be lost, but the overall drive of the satire should be obvious and enjoyable.

It’s a long piece to read. And though I’ve tried to do it justice I’m not sure I have. The best Dryden I’ve heard is in the film ‘England My England’ where whoever plays him does a superb job of reading the poems.

There is also a minor technical problem. All the versions of the poem I have seen name Dryden’s victim simply as Sh-. I tried reading it like this but it didn’t work, so Shadwell is named.

This is taken from ‘Selected Poetry and Prose of John Dryden’ edited by Earl Milner.

Carol Ann Duffy (1955- )

Rewriting stories was a popular strategy to challenge an overtly masculine version of history. But few writers did it so well as Duffy in ‘The World’s Wife’, a book of poems where the wives of the famous were allowed to speak.

They are mostly long suffering and unimpressed. There was Mrs. Daedalus watching her husband fall to earth, Mrs. Midas equally disgusted, terrified and saddened by her husband’s new skills, Little Red Riding Hood taking the wolf for all he’d got, Mrs. Faust getting the last laugh on the Devil and so on.

This sonnet is unusual in the collection. Unlike the other wives, Anne Hathaway remmembers her husband with affection. Instead of taking the opportunity for a bit of Bard Bashing over that notorious bequest, Duffy produces a love poem. And unlike some of Will’s sonnets, this one needs no explanations.

This is taken from The World’s Wife, Picador 1999

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

I’ve been wondering which of Graves’ vast output I should read after ‘Flying Crooked’ and the problem was solved when this one was requested.

‘In Broken Images’ juxtaposes two ways of thinking and celebrates the value of starting any thought process from a position of honest confusion or ignorance, and working towards a better understanding of the issue without falling into the trap of thinking the process is from doubt to certainty. Rather it’s from honest doubt to informed honest doubt.

There are too many hes and not enough Is in the world at present. And the education system has a tendency to reward the hes.

The Irony of this poem is that Graves went on to become the most didactic of English critics. However, Graves the younger man wrote marvelous books of idiosyncratic criticism. He later disowned them. But his essay on what is bad poetry, which begins ‘Poetic Unreason’ , is a mini masterpiece of the art of taking doubt seriously and following it to its logical conclusions. And then, having arrived a conclusion, having to start again.

This is taken from Carcanet’s ‘The complete poems in one volume’ edited by Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward. There’s a fine shorter selected (Faber 2013) edited by Michael Longley .

Poetic Unreason is only avilable on the second hand book market.

Rudyard Kipling (I865-1936)

‘You’re a better man than I am Gunga Din’.

I heard this phrase so often when I was growing up, it was years before I found out that it was part of a poem. Even then, the repetition of the phrase obscured the correct pronunciation and I was slow to realise the name was pronounced Deen not Din.

Perhaps like ‘Lead on MacDuff’, or ‘Him who asks no questions isn’t told no lies’ the phrase had come untethered from its context and was being used by people who didn’t know where it came from.

‘Though I’ve belted you and flayed you By the living God that made you You’re a better man than I am Gunga Din’

It’s hard to imagine words locked more securely into a poem’s rhythm.

And if you think Kipling’s Tommy is a racist, I think you’re missing the point of the story.

I've been rereading poems that were common knowledge when I was growing up. This is the last of that group.

Alfred Noyes (1880-1958)

File under poems that are enjoyable to read aloud?

I wonder how many children have had this poem inflicted on them by English teachers who have used it to teach ‘similes and metaphors’. Now, draw the moon as a ghostly galleon…Now find a simile and draw that..

Stripped down to its narrative bones it has the lack of sentiment of a traditional ballad. The Jealous Lover gets rid of his rival and in so doing causes the death of the woman he desires. Bess kills herself to save the Highwayman, but he dies anyway. Everybody loses. And like the central character in a good ghost story, the Highwayman keeps his promise, even though he’s dead.

It lacks the stripped down austerity of a genuine ballad, and the long vowel sounds ring false. Moon is repeated so often it begins to sound like a herd of cows in a paddock.

It's been set to music many times and if you’ve never heard it sung, Andy Irvine does a good version.

This is taken from ‘Poems and Ballads’ (1927).

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

‘Them that ask no questions, isn’t told a lie’.

I associate this poem with the run up to Christmas, because that line was often quoted, or more often misquoted, at me round about this time of year.

Like so much of Kipling’s poetry, it’s a pleasure to read aloud, although it does strange things to my accent.

It originally appeared in ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’, but this is taken from Rudyard Kipling ‘Complete Verse’ Anchor books 1940.

Christopher Logue (1926-2011)

Logue’s reputation rests securely on his version of Homer. ‘War Music’ may be one of the best narrative poems of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

But his ‘Selected poems’ show he was equally skilled with shorter, non-narrative forms.

The Selected contains two versions of well known poems by Franciose Villon (?1431-?1463). They are very much versions rather than strict translations. The French original for this one goes by different names: Ballade des pendus, Epitaphe Villon or Frères humains. The most arresting images in Logue’s poem are not in the original, nor is the ‘argument’ the poem offers.

If you’re interested in seeing what Logue did with that original, the French text and a literal translation can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballade_des_pendus

This poem is taken from Christopher Logue, Selected Poems Faber 2019.

This is Annoymous, Egyptian, from 1160 BC, and it’s translated by John L. Foster.

‘Let your heart be drunk on the gift of Day, until that day comes when you anchor’.

Good advice really.

It’s taken from the magnificent ‘World Poetry. An anthology of verse from Antiquity to the our time’ edited by Washburn and Major.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

There’s not a lot needs saying. He was also born in Coventry, though his upbringing and mine couldn’t be more different, and if ‘I remember I remember’ is anything to go by, he didn’t much like the place.

It’s easy to see him as the Eyeore of English poetry, but that would miss both the art and the performance of a character. The Chief Librarian of a Large University Library cannot be serious when he writes ‘books are a load of crap’.

Perhaps his star is currently fading as the personna attracts more attention than the poetry, more time spent on the letters than the poems, but Larkin was never going to be academically viable. You don’t need someone telling you what his poems ‘mean’. His work is both a reaction to ‘Modernism’ and a continuation of a much older tradition and can be enjoyed without commentary.

This is taken from his Collected Poems. (1988)

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (1942- )

The Swineherd? What exactly are his or her ‘special skills’? Why is there a Portguese lay sister in the kitchen, and how does cream crawl to the top of the jug? Where does it get dark early in summer?

All I know is that the first four lines have rattled in my head on so many occasions.

Whoever or wherever the swineherd is, he or she has my sympathy.

(I apologise, but I do not know how to pronounce this writer’s name, and I do not wish to insult her by mangling it.)

This is taken from ‘The Second Voyage’ (Revised ed, 1986)

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (1942- )

The Swineherd? What exactly are his or her ‘special skills’? Why is there a Portguese lay sister in the kitchen, and how does cream crawl to the top of the jug? Where does it get dark early in summer?

All I know is that the first four lines have rattled in my head on so many occasions.

Whoever or wherever the swineherd is, he or she has my sympathy.

(I apologise, but I do not know how to pronounce this writer’s name, and I do not wish to insult her by mangling it.)

This is taken from ‘The Second Voyage’ (Revised ed, 1986)

W.B. Yeats (1885-1939)

“The Unavoidable Poet’ again.

This is early Yeats. It's not an infallible test, since he never lost the art of it, but you can often tell by those long vowel sounds that set up the melodic line and make the poem sing itself. It’s not surprising this poem this has been set to music and sung.

Aengus Og, in Irish Mythology, is the god associated with youth. In one version of his story, Aengus is cursed to follow his lover, who is changed from one thing to another. Yeats has taken the story, but this is now as much persistence as it is the impossibility of his love for Maud Gonne.

Anyone who claims Aengus is stalking the girl is not paying close attention to the verbs.

Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998)

Mr. Cogito again. This time contemplating Virtue and her failure to seduce ‘real men’.

This is taken from ‘The Collected poems’ (Atlantic books 2008) a magnificent and dangerous book.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)

There’s a fascinating study waiting to be done comparing David Jones with Ivor Gurney.

Like David Jones, Gurney served as a private in the First World War. Like Jones, he has an established reputation in another field of the arts: in Gurney’s case, music. He was a composer of ‘art songs’ and considered, by those who know, to have been a good one.

Like Jones, Gurney was traumatised by his experiences, though in his case he spent from 1922 to his death in institutions.

Like Jones, as a poet, Gurney is perhaps not so well known. Neither of them is easily conscripted into the prevailing, ‘if it’s good it’s anti war’ mentality. His poems, while recording the horrors, also evoke the shared experience and community. Here, in ‘First Time In’, he records a memory of meeting Welsh soldiers, and his delight in their singing.

This poem is taken from ‘Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney’ (p 69). edited by P.J.Kavanagh. There is another, longer version of this poem, or another attempt to describe the same incident, on page 85.