Poetry

[ardcarp]

Interesting R4 programme today at 4.30pm The Poet and the Murderer

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05rl3w8

...all about an Emily Dickinson forgery.

[johncorrigan]

Wendy Cope was celebrating her hero, John Clare, on Great Lives today. Started with this one that she wrote twenty years back.

John Clare

John Clare, last night I cried
For you--your grass-green coat,
Your oddness, others' spite,
Your fame, enjoyed and lost,
Your gift, and what it cost.

Awake in the early hours,
I heard you with my eyes,
Carolling woods and showers.
As if a songbird's throat
Could utter words, you wrote.

I listened late and long--
Each clear, true, loving note
Placed justly in its song.
Sometimes for sheer delight,
John Clare, I cried last night.

Wendy Cope

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05stkqz

[ardcarp]

Good programme all round.

[Padraig]

Two short poems from a poet new to me: Jean Bleakney.

In Praise of Cinquefoils

He loves me he loves me not
is such a complicated plot.
How fickle petals are, how long
they sometimes take...then get it wrong.

If time is short and love is true
daisies aren't the flowers for you.
Take this botanical advice:
Buttercups are loaded dice.

The Ripple Tank Experiment LaganPress Belfast 1999



Justification

There is inherent productivity
in gardening left undone. Lawns
unmown preordain seed sown.
Shrubs, given their head, need
less upkeep than a rose bed.
A seedling ash or sycamore
unculled, is winter's perch
and summer's parasol. Leaves,
left where they fall, garner
and gird. Tree surgeons, hedge-
trimmers consider the birds!
Neglect yields manifold bowers.
Why, even nettles have flowers.

Ions Lagan Press Belfast 2011

[Padraig]

I'll try another pair from the same sources.

This one is for f f , a lover of words and flowers , probably, but not necessarily, in that order.

A Rose By Any Other
'Taxonomists have agreed to revert to using the name chrysanthemum'
- Gardening Which? November 1997.

Re-classifying Tricuspidaria lanceolata
as Crinodendron hookerianum
was no big deal.

It's only ever known as
the Lantern Tree (not to be confused
with Chinese Lantern Physalis alkekengii)

Even Lithospermum's demise
- subsumed by Lithodora-
hardly caused a ripple

But then
(let's put it down
to pre-millennial cockiness)
those flower-crazed taxonomists
decided on Dendranthema-
until, that is, appropriately in autumn,
some lover of words among them thought
Imagine a world with no chrysanthemums...

Jean Bleakney 1999

ps - I'm typed out after that. Part two will follow soon.

[Padraig]

Part two.

From words to no words. Another -ion poem

Salutation

Beyond B-roads - beyond Belcoo, say, or Ardara
there's a gesture, driver to driver. Pity the nonplussed stranger
who wonders at first...mistaken identity? a warning maybe
Mind the pothole! There's a bullock loose! Go easy,
Tommy's up ahead with the back rake! Too casual
for that. Only the paranoid would register a subliminal
we've got your number. By the third such encounter
the stranger is attuned as automatic as full beam. Beyond
submissiveness and the politesse of tight roads,
it's a civility slipped into easily, that forefinger
lazily raised: it's quaint Howya doin'? I'm doin' grand.

Jean Bleakney 2011

[Padraig]

Paul Durcan

Praise in Which I Live and Breathe and Have my Being

Harvill Secker 2012

I have a spare copy of this volume if anyone would like to have it as a present.
Here is a poem from it.

Staring Out the Window Three Weeks after his Death

On the last day of his life as he lay comatose in the hospital bed
I saw that his soul was a hare that was poised
In the long grass of his body, ears pricked.
It sprang towards me and halted and I wondered if it
Could hear me breathing
Or if it could smell my own fear, which was,
Could he have but known it, greater than his
For plainly he was a just and playful man
And just and playful men are as brave as they are rare.
Then his cancer-eroded body appeared to shudder
As if a gust of wind blew through the long grass
And the hare of his soul made a U-turn
And began bounding away from me
Until it disappeared from sight into a dark wood
And I thought - that is the end of that,
I will not be seeing him again.
He died in front of me; no one else was in the room.
My eyes teemed with tears; I could not damp them down.
I stood up to walk around his bed
Only to catch sight again of the hare of his soul
Springing out of the wood into a beachy cove of sunlight
And I thought; Yes. that is how it is going to be from now on.
The hare of his soul always there, when I least expect it;
Popping up out of nowhere, sitting still.

[Tevot]

Hello there Padraig,

Many thanks for the Paul Durcan poem above...

Here's one by Seamus Heaney:-



In memoriam Francis Ledwidge
Killed in France 31 July 1917

---------------------------------------------------------

The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape
That crumples stiffly in imagined wind
No matter how the real winds buff and sweep
His sudden hunkering run, forever craned

Over Flanders. Helmet and haversack,
The gun’s firm slope from butt to bayonet,
The loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque –
It all meant little to the worried pet

I was in nineteen forty-six or seven,
Gripping my Aunt Mary by the hand
Along the Portstewart prom, then round the crescent
To thread the Castle Walk out to the strand.

The pilot from Coleraine sailed to the coal-boat.
Courting couples rose out of the scooped dunes.
A farmer stripped to his studs and shiny waistcoat
Rolled the trousers down on his timid shins.

At night when coloured bulbs strung out the sea-front
Country voices rose from a cliff-top shelter
With news of a great litter – “We’ll pet the runt!” -
And barbed wire that had torn a friesian’s elder.

Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside
Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.
Literary, sweet-talking, countrified,
You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane.

Where you belonged, among the dolorous
And lovely: the May altar of wild flowers,
Easter water sprinkled in outhouses,
Mass-rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.

I think of you in your Tommy’s uniform,
A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,
Ghosting the trenches with a bloom of hawthorn
Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.

It’s summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girl
My aunt was then, herding on the long acre.
Behind a low bush in the Dardanelles
You suck stones to make your dry mouth water.

It’s nineteen-seventeen. She still herds cows,
But a big strafe puts the candles out in Ypres:
‘My soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows…
My country wears her confirmation dress.’

‘To be called a British soldier while my country
Has no place among nations…’ You were rent
By shrapnel six weeks later. ‘I am sorry
That party politics should divide our tents.’

In you, our dead enigma, all the strains
Criss-cross in useless equilibrium
And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze
I hear again the sure confusing drum

You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans
But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.
You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones
Though all of you consort now underground.

[johncorrigan]

Paul Durcan


Staring Out the Window Three Weeks after his Death

.

Thank you for that Padraig. Yesterday me and Mrs C turned a bend on the country track and an enormous hare lay ears flattened against its head in the short grass. We expected at any moment, for we had both seen it, that it would take off, perhaps towards us followed by the sudden U-turn...but it lay long after we passed, still, and we continued glancing over our shoulder till it was out of sight. It could be there yet for all I know.
How wonderfully Paul Durcan expresses the soul in the poem, that we think gone, but which pops up out of nowhere often when we least expect it.

[Tevot]

Thank you for that Padraig. Yesterday me and Mrs C turned a bend on the country track and an enormous hare lay ears flattened against its head in the short grass. We expected at any moment, for we had both seen it, that it would take off, perhaps towards us followed by the sudden U-turn...but it lay long after we passed, still, and we continued glancing over our shoulder till it was out of sight. It could be there yet for all I know.
How wonderfully Paul Durcan expresses the soul in the poem, that we think gone, but which pops up out of nowhere often when we least expect it.

Magnificently put Sir

[Padraig]

Magnificently put Sir

I would have said that, Tevot, if you had not beaten me to it.

Similarly, John, your response could well have been the trigger for your own poem if only Paul Durcan had not anticipated you. Or rather that your experience and your wife's added to Durcan's poem which in turn confirmed the value of your thoughts. Or something.

I really appreciated the Francis Ledwidge poem, Tevot; it is so long since I last read it. It's from Field Work, 1979, which I have surprisingly retrieved from my 'bookcase' and which I am now re-reading. Isn't it strange how a poetry book, or a cd, can disappear for a long time and come up fresh and new; like the hare, unexpectedly.

[Beef Oven!]

Rudyard Kipling

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk--
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control--
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Isn't it strange how a poetry book, or a cd, can disappear for a long time and come up fresh and new, like the hare, unexpectedly.

(But not if one "downsizes" to "save space" or whatever. Never enough! )


Many, many thanks to everyone for all the recent, wonderful contributions

[Padraig]

Paul Durcan

Praise in Which I Live and Breathe and Have my Being

Harvill Secker 2012

I have a spare copy of this volume if anyone would like to have it as a present.

I have an offer to accept this volume, and I would like to forward the book to that person. However, though I can accept and read private messages through the forum, I don't seem to be able to send them. Therefore I would ask that person to send me another PM with a forwarding address. Thanks, and apologies.

That is not a poem. Here is one from the said volume:

Toowoomba Father's Day Mystery Tour 2007

I am seventy-nine, not a pick on me,
A dairy farmer in Toowoomba.
Got all my gnashers still.
Finest town in Australia, Toowoomba.
The Garden City they call it.
Born there. I will die there.
At least I hope I will die there.
Here I am today in bloody Brisbane
All because to please a wife
I agreed to accompany her today
On the Toowoomba Father's Day Mystery Tour.

Up I was at 4 am - a Sunday morning for Christ's sake! -
To climb into a coach not knowing
Where I was going, to please a wife.
Mystery to me why I did it.
I ask you, man!
Where do I end up? In bloody Brisbane.
Squatting on a wall on the banks of the river
Looking at all that bloody water!
She's walked off in a stink on the boardwalk.
Where are you from anyway?
Ireland!
No offence, mate.
Tell you something for nothing, mate.
If I get back to Toowoomba tonight
I will never leave Toowoomba again
Not even if it's to please the hundred
thousand bloody wives of Osama
whatever his name is.
Enjoy your stay in Australia, mate.

[johncorrigan]

Thanks Padraig. Here's a beautiful piece from the American Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver that I was pointed towards recently.

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

Mary Oliver