poetry
-
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), the great Chilean poet, wrote this poem in 1936 as the Spanish Civil War began and Madrid moved from peace to war, from “the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,/wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea” to “the blood of children ran through the streets/without fuss.” Something similar happened in Chile…
-
A friend who died a year ago pointed me towards the poetry of Mary Oliver (1935-2019), America’s best-selling poet in 2007. My friend had chosen Oliver poems to be read at her funeral. She recommended me to buy Oliver’s collected poems, but I was put off by the price of the book. But my friend…
-
Tennyson’s In Memoriam AHH is to the 19th century what Eliot’s Waste Land was for the 20th century. (We still await the 21st century version.) In Memoriam AHH took Tennyson 17 years to write and is perhaps best thought of as a collection of linked poems rather than a single poem. AHH was Arthur Henry…
-
Tithonus was the son of Laomedon, the king of Troy, and the lover of Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos asked Zeus to give Tithonus eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tennyson wrote his poem Tithonus a month or two after the unexpected and sudden death of his 22-year-old friend Arthur Henry Hallam.…
-
I’m reading The Man Who Went Into The West, Byron Rogers’s hugely enjoyable and funny biography of R S Thomas, a poet I greatly admire and who seems to me a greater poet than the other great Welsh poet of the 20thcentury, Dylan Thomas. I came across this poem in the biography. RST is the…
-
Yesterday I stepped down after six years as the chair of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change. The Alliance brings together 54 organisations of health professionals, including most of the royal colleges, to do what we can to counter the climate and nature crisis. We work to mitigate the crisis, promote adaptation, and explain…
-
This is the third poem I’ve posted by Wendell Berry (1934–), an American poet whom I discovered only this year. I love the directness and earthiness of his poetry. As well as being a poet he is a farmer and an environmental campaigner. He entered my life again when a doctor from Hawaii sent me…
-
I came across this poem in an anthology called Poems to Make Grown Men Cry. It’s a stupid title, leading the moderately well-known men who have selected the poems to mention tears without either conviction or credibility. Nevertheless, the selection of poems is wide and marvellous with both familiar and new poems, prompting me to order Poems…
-
I came cross this poem in Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems in the English Language, a marvellous 963-page book that I bought in Garrison Keillor’s bookstore in Saint Paul and return to again and again. The poems are accompanied by Bloom’s thoughts on each poet, and his judgements are often severe. He has “not much…
-
Francisco Gomez de Quevedo (1580-1645) was a Spanish nobleman, politician, and poet. He used the style conceptismo, which has been defined as “a brilliant flash of wit expressed in pithy or epigrammatic style.” Conceptismo uses rapid rhythm, directness, simple vocabulary, witty metaphors, and wordplay. Multiple meanings are conveyed concisely. The style can be philosophical, satirical,…
A Cairn of Poems 