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Stag’s Leap, a collection of poems by Sharon Olds (1942-), tells the story of her husband of many years leaving and divorcing her. It’s her “masterpiece” and won both the T S Eliot Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. The poetry is beautiful. It doesn’t rhyme, doesn’t use any standard form, isn’t heroically quotable, and reads…

The greatest invention of the 20th century, I provocatively say, was “the good enough mother.” Being a mother is tough, and it makes no sense to aim to the “best mother in the world”: there can be only one, not that we can agree on the measurement. Fleur Adcock (1934), another favourite poet, captures beautifully…

A friend, an actor with the sense of beauty and of rhthym that can go with being an actor, ranks Theodore Roethke (1908-963) as her favourite poet. Various critics called him the greatest American poet, ahead of Walt Whitman. That seems to me to go too far. I have long known his poems, but I…

This poem might be my favourite poem if it made any sense to have a favourite poem. I particularly like the lines “World is crazier and more of it than we think,/Incorrigibly plural.” They seem to contain a deep truth, which is continued in the “The drunkenness of things being various.” We can never know…

I’ve just started reading “Diaries of a Dying” man by William Soutar (1898-1943), a Scottish poet of whom, I must confess, I had never heard. He spent the last 15 years of his life in bed, and his diaries are an account of those years with many thoughts thrown in. I plan to read his…

What might you do if you very much wanted to sleep with a married man or woman but were either unwilling to commit adultery or were afraid of the revenge of the wife or husband. The unknown Galla poet (or poets, which might be the case with Homer) has solved the problem in a highly…

U A Fanthorpe (1929-2009) is a delightful witty poet. Her poem comparing love to WD40 (household oil) is her best known poem and might be called “anti-romantic.” It tells of practical, familiar, and everyday form of love—what the Ancient Greeks called pragma, long-standing love. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/how-does-the-way-the-ancient-greeks-thought-of-love-fit-with-the-triangular-theory-of-love/ I’m amused as well that Fanthorpe titles the poem Atlas,…

Once you know Dover Beach by Mathew Arnold (1822-1888) it’s hard not to stand by the sea anywhere—but particularly on a singly beach at night—and think of the poem. He captures beautifully the “eternal note of sadness” in the unceasing roar of the waves. But we know he’s a classic, buttoned-up, conflicted. (Is there really…

For me the two great American poets are Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), both profoundly original and both strongly American. I love the way that Whitman’s poems roll on, just like the trains and plains that fill America and his poems. You start reading, and it’s hard to stop. One of Whitman’s greatest…

Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, but I had never heard of her until a friend sent me a book of her poems a few years ago. I read right through the book, enjoyed and admired the poems greatly, and wrote a blog about her poetry. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/wistawa-szymborska-a-poet-with-a-unique-voice-who-expresses-things-that-only-poetry-can-say/ I concluded that…