poetry
-
I had never heard of Elinor Wylie (1895-1928), but I stumbled across her and this poem because she follows on from Ezra Pound in Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language, having been born in the same year as Pound. Wylie, who was “obsessed with Shelley,” was a popular Jazz Age poet who…
-
I’ve just finished reading At the Loch of the Green Corrie by Andrew Greig, and much of the book is a tribute from a young poet to an older poet, Norman MacCaig (1910-1996). MacCaig loved to talk, drink whiskey, smoke, joke, fish, laugh, and be with friends. Greig praises the simplicity, directness, and intensity of…
-
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…
-
Love and freedom by Thomas Campbell: an anti-marriage, pro-adultery poem from the early 19th century
I came across the last four lines of this poem in Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure,” the most anti-marriage novel I know. Or was it in a book about the 150 poems Hardy wrote about his wife, 149 of them after she’d died. It doesn’t matter. Hardy had a very unhappy marriage, and there’s a…
-
At the moment our daughter is 36 weeks pregnant, and I inevitably thought of her when this morning I read this poem by Silvia Plath (1932-1962) describing the fetus in her womb. I find it an arresting poem with wonderful images: “Wrapped up in yourself like a spool”; “Snug as a bud and at home”;…
-
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 