The Poetry Voice

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...

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 res...

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 mu...

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. Afterwar...

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 transla...

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...

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...

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 up...

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’...

‘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...

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 n...

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 g...

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 t...

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 k...

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 cou...

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 time...

‘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...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 Victo...