The Poetry Voice

Lauren Frederick reads two poems from her new collection, "I saved a set for you.' The book is available on Amazon.

If you don't know the story, read on. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ is a fourteenth century poem that survives in  a single manuscript. The story begins in King Arthur’s court at Christmas when a huge green knight on a huge green horse rides into the court and challenges everyone to a game. He will stand one blow of his own axe as long as he can return the blow in a years’ time. No one at...

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) 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 and go...

John Dressel (b1934) I worry about my pronunciation of people’s names, so if I have mispronounced John Dressel’s I apologise. Like Hamlet, (who appeared in the previous post) Goliath has escaped the facts of 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...

Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016) This is the first of a short 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. ‘...

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) I have been rereading Yeats. 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...

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 away, and ent to university in Birmingham. I've often heard the phrase. It’s one of those faintly humorous regional insults that abound in the UK, suggesting something ab...

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,...

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 sol...

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. Bec...

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 scorn in 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 wh...

This is taken from A Man of Heart, published by Shearsman press (2023) Maxim 1 History is a record of brutality tempered by outbursts of idealism. Memory There 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 rememb...

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 spi...

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...

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 wa...

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 ‘w...

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 prese...

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...

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...

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’...

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...

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...

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 h...

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...

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 s...