The Poetry Voice

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...

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 i...

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...

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 influe...

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 bec...

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 pro...

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 l...

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 publ...

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. Wh...

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 Un...

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...

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 w...

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 accident...

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 transla...

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...

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 ‘Collecte...

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...

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 indepe...

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 b...

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 t...

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...

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 pr...