poem
-
I came across this poem in H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness, a book by Ivan Illich published in 1986. Illich, a former Catholic priest and critic of industrial society, is the intellectual who has had the biggest impact on me. I heard him deliver a condemnation of modern medicine as a medical student in Edinburgh…
-
Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), the Polish-American poet, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1980. Growing up in Poland and surviving the German occupation, he later moved to the United States. He wrote mostly in Polish. I have brushed up against his poetry, reading his poems in anthologies, and copying one, Eyes, into my files, but…
-
The first poem in my Cairn of Poems was In Praise of Marriage by Judith Wright (1915-2000). https://acairnofpoems.com/2024/05/28/in-praise-of-marriage/ I spent a year reading through her collected poems, and I must have encountered this short, simple and beautiful poem. But I didn’t remember it when I encountered it again in 100 Poems on the Underground. The…
-
I read this poem by Alastair Reid (1926-2014) in 20th Century Scottish Poems selected by Douglas Dunn, and it made me laugh. It captures two of the cardinal features of Scotland: it’s beautiful landscape, and the sometimes gloomy outlook of its natives. On a lovely sunny say, the poet walks into town and meets “the…
A Cairn of Poems 