Our English and Creative Writing lecturers pick some some significant poems for World Poetry Day<\/p>\n
Kate Tempest: Brand New Ancients<\/strong> (2013)\u2014The New Waste Land. In the old days But we are still mythical. (Tempest, 2013, p.1)<\/p>\n Note the lexical stride of \u2018ourselves\u2019 as it shifts its syntactical position in each line, much like the shifting of our own subjectivity, culture and the passing of time: a civilization taking one step forward and two steps back.<\/p>\n In this next passage, assonant sonority meanders through these phrases like a soundwave where \u2018your\u2019\/ \u2018distorted\u2019 and \u2018moss\u2019\/\u2019emboss\u2019, \u2018rock\u2019\/work\u2019 curl subtle filigrees against the more stoic, conventional rhyming of \u2018loathing\/clothing\u2019 at the lines\u2019 end. Generous, round vowels evoke gravitas and the echo of deep, ancient time:<\/p>\n [. . .] Kevin, your altar is covered in moss, Tempest is not the first poet to gaze into the antique past, to myth and the Classical world, in order to explain \u2018ourselves\u2019. T.S. Eliot\u2019s monolithic poem, The Waste Land (1922), too is a collage of intertexts which crisscross through Dante, Shakespeare, ancient Buddhist scripture, but also popular songs and lewd limericks. Part II of the Waste Land, \u2018A Game of Chess\u2019, dramatises the unhappy marriages of two couples, inflected with allusions to Anthony and Cleopatra, Dido and Aeneas, Elizabeth I and Leicester. Tempest, in her narrative poem, renders the relationships of two families with Eliotian pessimism, but not in the manner of pastiche. Tempest layers her own careful palimpsest of lyric pathos, dramatic epic, and their modern-day reincarnations: street poetry and rap. She glissades easily between speech, recitative and song in stiches so rhythmically complex they defy traditional scansion.<\/p>\n Brand New Ancients is, perhaps, the Waste Land of our age.<\/p>\n Lisa Mansell<\/strong><\/p>\n My grandma died on the 16th of March 2017 and it was a strangely hot day. It took her a long time to die. And while I waited I read a lot of poetry.<\/p>\n I wrote a creative non-fiction essay in part about her death called \u2018The Familiar Absence of Words.\u2019 Here is a brief extract:<\/p>\n I stayed with grandma for most of that day and read from a poetry book. The words were soothing. Love and loss are easier on a page: less ragged than real life. I read in bursts to the noise of grandma\u2019s rasping breaths and paused during the worrying silences in between. I read with intensity: I held the book like a bible.<\/p>\n This was one of the poems I read as my grandma lay dying.<\/p>\n Detail<\/strong> I was watching a robin fly after a finch \u2014 the smaller bird You can read the full essay \u2018The Familiar Absence of Words\u2019 here.<\/a><\/p>\n Hannah Stevens<\/strong><\/p>\n A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London<\/strong><\/p>\n Dylan Thomas<\/p>\n Never until the mankind making And I must enter again the round The majesty and burning of the child’s death. Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter, The renowned critic, Terry Eagleton, argues of this poem that \u2018the imagery \u2026 is largely at a tangent to the poem\u2019s official subject\u2019, and goes on to say how much he dislikes it. But isn\u2019t this to miss the point of Thomas\u2019s refusal and the anti-elegiac ambition of the verse? We have here 4 tightly structured sestets of rigid line-length and rhyme structure, giving the feeling of the conventional poetry of famous elegists such as Milton and Shelley. We become aware of the challenge to the conventions of the form in the long first line that takes us, breathlessly, from the opening, resistant \u2018Never\u2026\u2019 into the 3rd stanza. It is only here, in the 13th line of the poem, that the girl killed by the fire bombing of London becomes the subject of the poem; this line becomes the pivot of Thomas\u2019s contemplation of time and loss. Once acknowledged, the site and manner of the girl\u2019s death, in the underground stations where Londoners sheltered from the bombers, she becomes London\u2019s daughter, buried with the city\u2019s innumerable dead and the earth of the city takes her back as a mother. The symbolism of the poem draws attention to the condensation of time into these moments of loss: Thomas records how he enters the \u2018Zion of the water bead\u2019 and \u2018the synagogue of the ear of corn\u2019 to show how nature contains all of time. Here is a great old-fashioned Romantic poem by Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush. I love this poem because it spoke to me when I was about 12 and in no way a reader of poetry. When I say ‘spoke to me’, I mean it spoke of things that had, up till then, been only the vague and unfocused experience of my own life. It was a surprise to read, for example, that ‘The land’s sharp features seemed to be the century’s corpse outleant’<\/em> and to realise that somebody else (a dead poet) had once felt a rocky landscape, like the ones I knew from the Welsh mountains, to be an ancient body. The ‘century’s corpse<\/em>‘ gives this image a stronger connection with human life (our artificial slicing up of infinite time into hundreds of years). And this corpse is then made even more human by the addition of cloud and wind: ‘His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament<\/em>‘.<\/p>\n That ordinary landscape could express the whole drama of human life so clearly and directly seemed magical to me. And that is just in one of the verses. How about the next bit: ‘The ancient pulse of germ and birth was shrunken hard and dry’<\/em>? What is the ‘ancient pulse’? It doesn’t exist, except in our own sense of what life is. Dylan Thomas, in another great nature poem, called it ‘the force’. The title alone is a poem: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. Learn these two poems and they will stay with you for life: every winter, every spring, you’ll communicate with these two long dead voices.<\/p>\n The Darkling Thrush <\/strong><\/p>\n Thomas Hardy<\/p>\n I leant upon a coppice gate<\/p>\n When Frost was spectre-grey,<\/p>\n And Winter’s dregs made desolate<\/p>\n The weakening eye of day.<\/p>\n The tangled bine-stems scored the sky<\/p>\n Like strings of broken lyres,<\/p>\n And all mankind that haunted nigh<\/p>\n Had sought their household fires.<\/p>\n The land’s sharp features seemed to be<\/p>\n The Century’s corpse outleant,<\/p>\n His crypt the cloudy canopy,<\/p>\n The wind his death-lament.<\/p>\n The ancient pulse of germ and birth<\/p>\n Was shrunken hard and dry,<\/p>\n And every spirit upon earth<\/p>\n Seemed fervourless as I.<\/p>\n At once a voice arose among<\/p>\n The bleak twigs overhead<\/p>\n In a full-hearted evensong<\/p>\n Of joy illimited;<\/p>\n An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,<\/p>\n In blast-beruffled plume,<\/p>\n Had chosen thus to fling his soul<\/p>\n Upon the growing gloom.<\/p>\n So little cause for carolings<\/p>\n Of such ecstatic sound<\/p>\n Was written on terrestrial things<\/p>\n Afar or nigh around,<\/p>\n That I could think there trembled through<\/p>\n His happy good-night air<\/p>\n Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew<\/p>\n And I was unaware.<\/p>\n Margaret Leclere<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our English and Creative Writing lecturers pick some some significant poems for World Poetry Day Kate Tempest: Brand New Ancients (2013)\u2014The New Waste Land. If you invest in just one poetry collection this year, get Brand New Ancients by Kate … Continue reading
\nIf you invest in just one poetry collection this year, get Brand New Ancients by Kate Tempest. In fact, it is not a collection\u2014rather, a long poem which bounds with vociferous energy over its forty-seven pages. The book begins with an aphoristic inscription: \u201cThis poem was written to be read aloud\u201d, and to read it alongside a recording of Tempest\u2019s virtuosic spoken-word performance is enthralling.
\nThe text begins with a meditation on myth:<\/p>\n
\nthe myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves.
\nBut how can we explain the way we hate ourselves,
\nthe things we\u2019ve made ourselves into,
\nthe way we break ourselves in two,
\nthe way we overcomplicate ourselves?<\/p>\n
\nthe inscription distorted, embossed long ago, it said once\u2014
\nstay true, even if others do not.
\nHe breaks through the rock of his silent self-loathing,
\nclimbs into his clothing
\nand heads off to work. [. . .] (Tempest, 2013, p.8)<\/p>\n
\nEamon Grennan<\/p>\n
\nchirping with excitement, the bigger, its breast blazing, silent
\nin light-winged earnest chase \u2014 when, out of nowhere
\nover the chimneys and the shivering front gardens,
\nflashes a sparrowhawk headlong, a light brown burn
\nscorching the air from which it simply plucks
\nlike a ripe fruit the stopped robin, whose two or three
\ncheeps of terminal surprise twinkle in the silence
\nclosing over the empty street when the birds have gone
\nabout their own business, and I began to understand
\nhow a poem can happen: you have your eye on a small
\nelusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth
\nstrikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.<\/p>\n
\nBird beast and flower
\nFathering and all humbling darkness
\nTells with silence the last light breaking
\nAnd the still hour
\nIs come of the sea tumbling in harness<\/p>\n
\nZion of the water bead
\nAnd the synagogue of the ear of corn
\nShall I let pray the shadow of a sound
\nOr sow my salt seed
\nIn the least valley of sackcloth to mourn<\/p>\n
\nI shall not murder
\nThe mankind of her going with a grave truth
\nNor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
\nWith any further
\nElegy of innocence and youth.<\/p>\n
\nRobed in the long friends,
\nThe grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
\nSecret by the unmourning water
\nOf the riding Thames.
\nAfter the first death, there is no other.<\/p>\n
\nThomas defers the lamentation of the dead girl to the second half of the poem to illustrate the futility of attempting to capture the tragedy of this loss \u2013 one of so many in the war \u2013 in the form of a poem. He \u2018shall not murder\u2019 her again, he insistently tells us, with an \u2018Elegy of innocence and youth\u2019.
\nDylan\u2019s anti-elegy records the loss of the girl in the blitz but as her death is insignificant in the scale of the war and the immensity of time, he is unable to offer consolation.
\nMark Brown<\/strong><\/p>\n