The Poetry Voice

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) This poem makes an interesting contrast with Louise MacNeice’s Thalassa. The poet may be an experienced sailor (Bunting was) and he may be talking to his boat, but there’s a sense of defeat here lacking in MacNeice’s poem. The epigraph to this poem is ‘Perche no Spero’, because there is no hope, which I left out of the reading for no other reason than I forgot to read it.

John Agard (1949-) My first encounter with John Agard’s poetry was his collection ‘Love Lines for a Goat-Born Lady’. I don’t know if I’d read Grace Nichols first and then read John Agard because they were married or if it were the other way round and it really didn’t matter. They were both eye opening. When 'Milk and Honey’ by Rupi Kaur recently went mega on the best seller lists, journalists tied...

John Clare (1793-1864) Clare is one of the contested figures in the ‘Romantic Movement’. He has the credentials, a farm labourer, his nature poetry was based on detailed observation of the world around him, he was mostly self educated and he ended his life in what was then called a lunatic asylum. But his poetry sits awkwardly against his more well known and better connected peers. His ‘nature poe...

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting proposition. If it’s one of your favourites, and you don’t like my reading, I apologise. Paradoxically, the poem works so well because although it mentions specific places, you’d never know who the Irish Airman was or in which war he was fighting from t...

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) Peter McDonald printed this as as the last poem in his edition of MacNeice’s ‘Collected poems’. It has an attractive combination of elegy and defeat and determination. Thalassa is the Greek word for the sea. For a classicist like MacNeice, it’s overloaded with connotations. From Xenaphon and his ragged army, desperately trying to get home, to the image of ageing Ulysses,...

Rumplestiltskin. This is my favourite story told by the Grimm brothers. Their version is a masterpiece of narrative economy. If you’ve read the earlier French version you can only admire how much has been stripped out by the time they got to it. Like most folk stories it won’t survive logical scrutiny, but it moves so swiftly you don’t have time to stop and consider how strange it is, or how incon...

Percy Shelley (1792-1822) Change the date, or change country and date. Some things don’t change much. Though the hopeful ending is getting harder to believe in. It was Shelley who claimed that Poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. If he really believed such mellifluous waffle he was delusional. He may have been outraged by the Peterloo Massacre, but sitting in his garden in I...

Robert Burns (1759-1796) One of the glories of English poetry, or poetry in English, is the short lyric. There are thousands of them, and some of them, like this one, are excellent. A memorable statement of a commonplace idea which is not undermined by the knowledge that the poet probably got bored of the original addressee and tried the poem out on someone else. When Richard Tottel printed the fi...

Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) One of the most popular English language poets of the twentieth century. His collected poems sold over two million copies. One of the nastier assumptions about modern poetry is that it’s not possible to be popular and good. Great poets have five readers and an academic following. Popular poets have either no talent or have prostituted themselves to find an audience. A...

George Gascoigne (1535-1578) I know very little about George Gascoigne, and looking him up on line hasn’t added much to that. But I do like this poem for its combination of weary resignation and sly humour. And poems like this are the reason why good anthologies are so valuable. I found this one in Seven Centuries of Poetry in English, edited by John Leonard. A lot can be said against anthologies,...

Robert Graves (1895-1985) The ‘Greek Version’, which is the ‘historical version’ is that in 490 BCE, the citizens of Athens and some allies defeated a numerically superior Persian army at Marathon. In doing so they stopped the first Persian attempt to conquer Greece. Marathon became a symbol of small nations fighting for freedom against overwhelming odds. Graves was having fun imagining the Persia...

Liam Guilar The most frightening ghost stories I’ve encountered were told around the table by my English Grandmother and my Irish Father. There was no attempt to ‘be frightening. They both believed in the truth of the stories they were telling. This one scared me most because it didn’t finish. It seemed to be all detail and no story. Years later, when I remembered to ask her what was under the flo...

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) Student: Sir! Is he trying to get her clothes off….? Me:…. Student: It’s not gonna work is it? If it’s not surprising that so many English poems seem to have a speaker, usually male, addressing someone, usually female, and trying to get them to undress, what is remarkable is how many of those speakers are doomed to failure if the poem is all they’ve got. And this is one...

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) Form became a fetish in some kingdoms of poetry world in the later twentieth century. Creative writing students practised Sestinas and Villanelles, and some of them produced technically proficient examples. Most of them were immediately forgettable, and if you enjoy trivial pursuits a good question is 'Name three great villanelles written in the twentieth century'. What th...

Robert Service (1874-1958) You could turn your nose up at Robert Service and his poems. He called them verse, poetry was something other people wrote. He pads his lines, he isn’t afraid to use a cliche when it fits, and the rhythm often seems to be only on nodding terms with the sense. He’s old fashioned. Out of date. etc etc. And this poem is haunted by the ghost of a much greater one. But turnin...

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) One of the underrated poets of the twentieth century. A fine critic, an entertaining writer of prose and a fine poet, (unfairly I think) overshadowed in the history books by his friend W.H. Auden. Perhaps his reputation also suffers because although Irish, he lived most of his life in England. So he misses out on the club value of ‘Irish Poet’ while remaining outside the...

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) Nasty little words, nasty long words, it's unhealthy. I want to wash when I meet a poet. They're Reds, addicts, all delinquents. What you write is rot. You can enjoy this poem as a joke, or as a caricature of a very common attitude towards poetry. Writing is not work in the way being a bus conductor is work, and if the ten year old son can do it and rhyme, and the school...

Andy Brown This is taken from Brown’s sequence ‘Casket’ (Shearman 2019). The casket in question is the Franks Casket, an 8th century Whale bone box currently in the British Museum. What pictures of the Box don't do is show how small the thing is, or how intricate the carving. The Anglo-Saxons were blessed with superb craftsmen. If you get the chance, go see the box in the British Museum, or some o...

John Milton (1608-1674) This is the third of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’. This is from Book Twelve,  line 624 ff. It’s the end of the poem. Although Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise, they turn towards their future and the world is, literally, ‘all before them’. Although this is their punishment, it doesn’t sound like it. True they are banned from Paradise, but the poem escapes the t...

John Milton (1608-1674) This is the second of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’. This is from Book Nine,  line 421 ff Satan has escaped from Hell and found Adam and Eve. In this extract he finds Eve alone in the Garden. The extract includes one of my favourite moments in English Poetry (I have a lot of favourite moments) when Satan is made ‘Stupidly good’ by the sight of Eve. It also contains so...

John Milton (1608-1674) This is the first of three readings from ‘Paradise Lost’. This is from Book One, lines 242-270 The story begins with the fallen angels in Hell. In this brief excerpt Satan has emerged from the lake of fire into which he was cast down. He steps on to dry land, and surveying hell, his prison and the proof of his defeat, rebrands it as his kingdom. There are many ways in which...

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) A poem in three movements. In the first, Eliot catches the grumbling voice of a man unaccustomed to hard travelling, remembering the uncomfortable details of a preposterous journey. In the second, the Magi find what they thought they were looking for ‘and it was (you may say) satisfactory’. And in the third the speaker acknowledges the ambiguity of that experience, which mar...

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) An obvious choice for the season. Perhaps better known as the Carol, ‘In the Bleak Mid Winter’. It’s interesting attempting to read this while trying to ignore the familiar cadence of the sung version. This is taken from the Penguin Classics ‘Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems’.

‘Lady Godiva and Me’ is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry. My idea was that anyone who stood on a street corner in the city could imagine the swirling voices of all the people who had lived there since the city was first founded. In the first section, ‘History to Legend’, the voices of Leofric, Godgifu/Godiva and Peeping Tom can be heard. Here’s Peeping Tom, unapologetic,...

‘Lady Godiva and Me’ is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry. The idea was that anyone who stood on a street corner in the city, could imagine the swirling voices of all the people who had lived there since the city was first founded. The second part of the sequence, called ‘The Modern City’ suggests the voices of the migrant communities that made the city after the second w...