Category Archives: Poetry

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Invisible Man’ by @MargaretAtwood #poetry

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At Christmas I was given Dearly, the slim hardback book of Margaret Atwood’s poems. I’ve never thought of her as a poet but Dearly is a revelation. As with her novels, Atwood crystalises those intense emotional moments of life, the ones that stay with us, and sets them into everyday context. This is a wonderful collection about growing old, rememberings, endings and beginnings, passing by and moving on. Dedicated to her partner it is a personal collection, and very touching.

Margaret Atwood

[photo: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo – Alamy Stock Photo]

The poem I have chosen is ‘Invisible Man’. A short poem of five verses, full of how it feels to lose your lifelong partner. The absence at the table, on a walk, like an invisible man in comic books, still there but seen only by the one left behind, remembering

This poem is subject to copyright restrictions so here’s the first verse as a taster. Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Invisible Man’
It was a problem in comic books:
drawing an invisible man.
They’d solve it with a dotted line
that no one but us could see’

Margaret AtwoodBUY THE BOOK

Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘Tulips’ by Wendy Cope
‘Serious’ by James Fenton
‘Sounds of the Day’ by Norman MacCaig

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A poem to read in the bath… ‘Lark & Merlin’ by Tom Pickard #poetry #nature

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Tom Pickard grew up in the working class suburbs of Newcastle upon Tyne and left school at fourteen. Three years later he met poet Basil Bunting and Pickard began his life as a poet. His background in the North East is the spine of his work, local words and slang inhabit his work, but two recent volumes have taken him to the isolated countryside of the Borders where England meets Scotland. Most magical of all this work is ‘Lark & Merlin’ is about the dance between a man and a woman; like the hunting/courting flight of two birds – the lark and the merlin – diving and flying, tossed in the wind as memories are tossed in the middle of the night.

Tom Pickard

Tom Pickard [photo: Charles Smith]

‘Lark & Merlin’ is included in Pickard’s Fiends Fell, a combination of journal entries and poems, telling of one year in his life on a bleak fell in Northern England. Pickard is now working on the second edition of Fiends Fell.

This poem is subject to copyright restrictions. Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Lark & Merlin’

a wren,

perched on a hawthorn

low enough to skip

the scalping winds,

 

sang a scalpel song

 

sea frets drift

sheer along shorelines

Listen to Tom Pickard read ‘Lark & Merlin’ here.
Tom Pickard BUY THE BOOK

Read the first lines of ‘After a Row’ by Tom Pickard.

Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘Sounds of the Day’ by Norman MacCaig 
‘A Shropshire Lad: loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ by AE Housman 
‘The Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost

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A #poem to read in the bath: ‘Lark & Merlin’ by Tom Pickard https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4n4 via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Poor Girl’ by Maya Angelou #poetry #women

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I can hear the sorrow in every word of this woman who feels cheated, cynical in her understanding that she loved a wrong ‘un. This is ‘Poor Girl’ by Maya Angelou. She is angry, talking directly to a former lover who has betrayed her.

Maya Angelou

[photo: Wikipedia]

It has a simple structure, a repetition that reflects the sense of inevitability as he finds a new love; and the inevitability that this new love will soon turn into another old love, another poor girl, as yet again he uses then moves on. In her poetry Angelou loves men, but she also trashes badly behaved disrespectful unloving men.

This poem is subject to copyright restrictions. Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Poor Girl’
You’ve got another love
            and I know it
Someone who adores you
            just like me
Hanging on your words
            like they were gold
Thinking she understands
            your soul
Poor Girl
            Just like me

Maya Angelou BUY THE BOOK

Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘My Father’ by Yehuda Amichai 
‘Sometimes and After’ by Hilda Doolittle
‘I Loved Her Like the Leaves’ by Kakinonoto Hitomaro

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
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A poem to read in the bath… ‘My Father’ by Yehuda Amichai #poetry

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I came across this very short poem – only six lines – in an anthology. The book has been on my shelf for quite a while and every now and then I pick it up and flick through at random. One day, the page fell open at this exquisite poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, translated from the Hebrew by Azila Talit Reisenberger. Written as an adult, in this scant lines Amichai captures the ongoing love of child for parent, caught in a tiny everyday familiar detail.

Yehuda Amichai

[photo: Layle Silbert]

Said Ted Hughes of Amichai, “I’ve become more than ever convinced that Amichai is one of the biggest, most essential, most durable poetic voices of this past century–one of the most intimate, alive and human, wise, humorous, true, loving, inwardly free and resourceful, at home in every human situation. One of the real treasures.”

Amichai died in 2000. His poems, written in Hebrrew, have been translated into 40 languages. All poetry is political, Amichai told the Paris Review: “This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”

This poem is subject to copyright restrictions. Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘My Father’

The memory of my father is wrapped up in
white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day at work.

Yehuda AmichaiBUY THE BOOK

Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘Poems’ by Ruth Stone
‘Cloughton Wyke 1’ by John Wedgwood Clarke
‘We Needed Coffee But…’ by Matthew Welton

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A #poem to read in the bath: ‘My Father’ by Yehuda Amichai https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4cn via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘What I Learned From My Mother’ by Julia Kasdorf #poetry

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Written in 1992 by American poet Julia Kasdorf, What I Learned From My Mother is a poem that crosses time, languages, cultures and continents. Its message is familiar to all women. The rituals of death and grieving, of condolence, of a kind word, flowers and chocolate cake and the blessing of your presence. Julia Kasdorf

This poem is subject to copyright restrictions. Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘What I Learned From My Mother’

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and click out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

Julia KasdorfBUY THE BOOK

Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘Invictus’ by WE Henley 
‘Runaways’ by Daniela Nunnari
‘Valediction’ by Seamus Heaney 

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A #poem to read in the bath: ‘What I Learned From My Mother’ by Julia Kasdorf  https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4ch via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas #poetry

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Dylan Thomas’s most famous, arguably most familiar, poem is a villanelle with five stanzas of three lines followed by a single stanza of four lines, making a total of 19 lines. It is structured with two repeating rhymes, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ and ‘Rage, rage, against the dying of the light’. Written in 1947 when Thomas was in Florence with his family, it is popularly thought to refer to the death of his father though his father did not die until 1952. In contrast to many poems of death, popular for reading at funerals, this speaks clearly and strongly at the anger and resentment at dying.

Dylan Thomas

[photo: poetryfoundation.org]

Due to copyright restrictions, I cannot reproduce the whole poem here. Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and race at close of day;
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

 
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

 
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Dylan ThomasBUY THE BOOK

Dylan ThomasThomas’s best known poem has been referenced frequently in popular culture. In the 1996 film Independence Day, the president gives a rousing speech to his bedraggled army as they prepare to fight the aliens, saying “We will not go quietly into the night.”
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Dylan ThomasIn the 2014 film Interstellar, the poem is quoted frequently by Michael Caine’s character, Professor John Brand, while Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway are sent into hyper sleep with the words, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
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Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘Dunt: A Poem for a Dried-Up River’ by Alice Oswald 
‘After a Row’ by Tom Pickard
‘My Mother’ by Ruby Robinson

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A #poem to read in the bath: ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4bZ via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Sounds of the Day’ by Norman MacCaig #poetry #Scotland

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The poems of Scottish poet and teacher Norman MacCaig are noted for their simplicity and directness. Irish poet Seamus Heaney described MacCaig’s verse, ‘His poems are discovered in flight, migratory, wheeling and calling. Everything is in a state of restless becoming: once his attention lights on a subject, it immediately grows lambent.’  Describing his native Scotland, MacCaig shows us the familiar world with a freshness and a keen eye for humble subjects.

Norman MacCaig

[photo: Scottish Poetry Library]

This poem is subject to copyright restrictions. Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Sounds of the Day’

When a clatter came,
It was horses crossing the ford.
When the air creaked, it was
A lapwing seeing us off the premises
Of its private marsh. A snuffling puff
Ten yards from the boat was the tide blocking and
Unblocking a hole in a rock.
When the black drums rolled, it was water
Falling sixty feet into itself.

Norman MacCaigBUY THE BOOK

Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘Along The Field As We Came By’ by AE Housman
‘The Boy Tiresias’ by Kate Tempest
‘The Roses’ by Katherine Towers

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A #poem to read in the bath: ‘Sounds of the Day’ by Norman MacCaig https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4cc via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti #poetry #funeral

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Christina Rossetti was 31 when her most famous collection Goblin Market and Other Poems was published in 1862 but perhaps better known are two other poems. Her 1872 poem A Christmas Carol was set to music by Gustav Holst and renamed In the Bleak Midwinter, and her short poem Remember appears regularly in poems of funeral verse. Her lines of sweet and lyrical verse go straight to the emotional heart of her subject and explain which she remains popular today.

Christina Rossetti

[photo: Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo]

Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Remember’

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Christina Rossetti BUY THE BOOK

Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘Digging’ by Seamus Heaney
‘My Life’s Stem was Cut’ by Helen Dunmore
‘The Unthinkable’ by Simon Armitage

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A #poem to read in the bath: ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4c6 via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Invictus’ by WE Henley #poetry #courage

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William Ernest Henley began to write poetry at the age of twelve, when he was confined to his hospital bed following the amputation of his leg. Best known for Invictus, Henley continued to write poetry on the theme of inner strength and perseverance. WE Henley

Please search for the full poem in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Invictus’

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Listen to Dana Ivey read Invictus at The Poetry Foundation.

WE HenleyBUY THE BOOK

WE HenleyMost quoted is the line from Invictus, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul” which has inspired much popular culture. Nelson Mandela read the poem to his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison, as portrayed in the Clint Eastwood film, Invictus.
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Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘A thousand years, you said’ by Lady Heguri
‘Winter Song’ by Wilfred Owen
‘Not Waving but Drowning’ by Stevie Smith

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A #poem to read in the bath: ‘Invictus’ by WE Henley https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4bR via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Valediction’ by Seamus Heaney #poetry #love

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The poems that touch me are those that distil a feeling, an experience, an emotion, into a simple few lines. Seamus Heaney was a master of this technique. In Valediction, from the 1966 collection Death of a Naturalist, the absence of a woman is felt keenly. It is a love poem, short and honest, longing for the return of his love.

Seamus Heaney

[photo: thepoetryfoundation.org]

Because of copyright restrictions I am unable to reproduce the poem in full, but please search it out in an anthology or at your local library.

‘Valediction’

Lady, with the frilled blouse
And simple tartan skirt,
Since you left the house
Its emptiness has hurt
All thought.

Seamus HeaneyBUY THE BOOK

Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘Happiness’ by Stephen Dunn
‘May-Day Song for North Oxford’ by John Betjeman
‘I Loved Her Like the Leaves’ by Kakinonoto Hitomaro

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
A #poem to read in the bath: ‘Valediction’ by Seamus Heaney https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4bN via @SandraDanby