Falling in love with great poetry

from Falling in love on the way home by Fiona Farrell

"a hill stretched
out its brown arm and
drew me close I could
smell the sweat of its
crevices at every turn

then a harbour licked
my ear whispering the
things harbours say
to all the girls about
other places they have
touched but you’re the
one babe hey you’re
the one"

read the whole thing online here (click the tab that says, "from Fugacity 05 Online Poetry Anthology")

A green mother by Ted Hughes

Why are you afraid?
In the house of the dead are many cradles.
The earth is a busy hive of heavens.
This is one lottery that cannot be lost.

Here is the heaven of the tree:
Angels will come to collect you.
And here are the heavens of the flowers:
These are an everliving bliss, a pulsing, a bliss in sleep.


....read the poem in its entirety here.


One of my all-time-favourite poems, A green mother is from Cave Birds, my all-time-favourite Hughes poetry collection. You can read the whole book here, although you can't see the amazing Leonard Baskin drawings which accompany the poems. Sadly, Cave Birds is out of print, but your library may have it.

Perverting the course of poetry

"Let mit though hought lips com. If to rosy wheigh his ithought looks, But on heigh rosy looks, not is Adminders not is compests. Loveration th hought beark Thaken me mark Thakend wan ime's this neve removents. Loverief thought mar shat lov...ers ben."

"Let me no! it alters with his be edge of doom. If true marriage of doom. If though rosy lips and weeks, Or bending sickle's fool, the error and weeks, Or bends Admit is bends with his not with the star to remove alteration finds Admit although his thour"

- versions of Sonnet 116 via the Travesty Generator!

The Generator allows you to set the "travesty level" low, so there are only small changes, or high, so the words themselves are broken up. The second one was somewhere in the middle. I like the way the first one almost reads like dialect or archaic English - it looks like it makes sense if only you can figure it out! Like Robert Burns or Chaucer or something.

Rumour has it that They Might Be Giants and the Travesty Generator are jointly responsible for "Millennium hand and shrimp" in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld books.

Apologies to those who read this already when I posted it on Facebook!

The Moon-Bull

Beautiful O Beautiful
Is the moon-bull
Mild, immense and white
He sniffs the moist night.

He sniffs the black hole
Through which slowly roll
The teeming galaxies.
He is always at ease.

He thinks Night is his cow.
There he stands now
Licking the glossy side
Of his infinite bride.

Ted Hughes, from Moon Whales.

Moon Whales, supposedly for children, is one of Ted Hughes' best and most accessible collections of poems. Sadly, it's out of print, but it's available in libraries, or if you're lucky you can pick it up second-hand.

Images copyright 2009 Grace Dalley. All rights reserved.

Eileen Duggan: stunning poetry

Eileen Duggan (1894–1972) was well-known in New Zealand in the 1930s and 1940s as a leading poet; she supported herself full time as writer for 50 years, producing not only poetry but essays, reviews and journalism.

I first came across Eileen Duggan's work in the beautiful anthology My Heart Goes Swimming: New Zealand Love Poems , which also contains other New Zealand greats such as Katherine Mansfield, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Cilla McQueen, James K Baxter, Hone Tuwhare, Bill Manhire, Fleur Adcock, Lauris Edmond, and many others. Unfortunately this book is currently out of print.

Duggan's poetry is polished and formal, which will alienate some readers, and at its worst can be sentimental and contrived, but at its best I think it's breathtaking! I haven't been able to locate any of her books of poetry still in print, but some can be found in libraries. Meanwhile here are three poems to whet your appetite:

The tides run up the Wairau

The tides run up the Wairau
That fights against their flow
My heart and it together
Are running salt and snow.

For though I cannot love you,
Yet heavy, deep and far,
Your tide of love comes swinging,
Too swift for me to bar

Some thought of you must linger
A salt of pain in me
For oh what running river
Can stand against the sea?



Night

You are the still caesura
That breaks a line in two;
A quiet leaf of darkness
Between two flowers of blue

A little soft indrawing
Between two sighs;
A slender spit of silence
Between two seas of cries.



Illumination

The leaf was dark until a wind
Flung it against the living sun
And all the little cells behind
Were lit up one by one
...
Lord, if my green has power of fire,
Fling me against you love or ire
That I may give you out again
In one green, luminous amen.


You can read more about Eileen Duggan on her Book Council page, and there are some photographs of her here.

A parallel universe where poetry is considered important!

Poet David Beach has won the biennial Prize in Modern Letters for his book of poems Abandoned Novel.

He says, "That a book of poems can win a $65,000 prize makes me feel as if I've stumbled into a parallel universe where poetry is considered important,".

Read all about it here.

You can buy Abandoned Novel by David Beach here.

The Ode Less Traveled: Unlocking the Poet within

I picked up this book partly because it was by the always-interesting Stephen Fry, but mostly because of its sublimely apposite title. Turns out Fry has a passion for writing formal poetry, and he thinks we should all give it a go; I haven't worked my way through the whole book yet (there are lots of funny exercises along the way), but he has convinced me that there might be something in it. It's a fascinating and addictive book for anyone interested in writing or better appreciating poetry.

Incidentally, Stephen Fry has a brilliant blog.

The Inhabited Initial

I have been savouring Fiona Farrell's poetry collection The Inhabited Initial, which deals with the ancient middle-eastern sources of our alphabet, as well as related issues of power, violence, history and language in the Middle East.

from "The Translator"

"The translator dangles/ by a thread above/ thickets of sound.// He presses his hand at/ the small sharp print/ of an ancient tongue.// His fingers feel for the/ crack where words can/ spill from the rock like water."

There are memorable New Zealand poems, too. I love this, from "Otanerito":

"Cliff meets sea./ Sea bash at/ knuckle rock./ Thump, says sea./ Cliff says/ stop."

It's so like her poem "Full stop":

"The little dot raises its hand./ It breaks into the letters marching/ from left to right and forces them to/ form cohorts of meaning. It insists on quiet."

Land, language, human struggle, all bound together. Fantastic.