David Jones (1895-1974) Why me? In this particular case, why is this soldier on duty at The Crucifixion and not that one? More generally, why did some soldiers sign up for the first world war and find themselves in units sent into action on their first day at the front while other, signing up on the same day find themselves transferred to garrison duties? Why me? What impossible string of accidents and co-incidences caused me to be here at that particular place and time? This extract from ‘The F...
Jun 26, 2020•3 sec•Ep. 137
Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017) For my generation, perhaps the best known Russian Poet. Perhaps even more visible than the more critically acclaimed Brodsky. Whether he was best known because he was marketable in ‘The West’ or because he was the best of his contemporaries in Russia is, for those of us who rely on translations, an unanswerable question. But sometimes, dealing with poetry in translation, you can be forgiven for wondering what’s being valued. Not in the case of this poem. Even if i...
Jun 25, 2020•3 min•Ep. 136
This is the last poem in ‘Rough Spun to Close Weave’. Shackleton’s Grave(A Wish) There will be peace and an end to traveling ,the colour of ocean under a polar sky, solid as mountains, to bear the brunt of storms that can no longer trouble the sleeper in the wind-raked earth. Time will be glacial, patient as icebergs where no rumours whisper, no duty calls, the strong heartbeat of spring and its flowers: the tides’ turn, the snow’s fall. (Liam Guilar) 'Rough spun to Close Weave' is available fro...
Jun 18, 2020•38 sec•Ep. 135
R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) I first encountered R.S.Thomas’s work in a school poetry text book in about 1975. I’ve been reading his poetry, with admiration and enjoyment, ever since. In the twentieth century’s three horse Thomas race, I’d back R.S over Dylan and Edward. Over the course of a long writing life he produced a enormous number of high quality poems. ‘Collected Poems 1945-1990’ and ‘Collected Later poems 1988-2000’ combined run to over 800 pages. Most of the poems, like this one, take up l...
Jun 17, 2020•52 sec•Ep. 134
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) When does English Poetry begin? You could argue Caedmon’s Hymn, the earliest datable poem in Old English. But listen to it on the Poetry Voice: Caedmon’s Hymn isn’t written in English. You could argue for Chaucer, who is readable with patience by any literate modern English speaker. Or you could go straight to Wyatt. Who is perhaps the first English poet to sound like a modern poet. He has been the subject of two superb but very different, and therefore complimentary...
May 27, 2020•54 sec•Ep. 133
Sir Walter Raleigh (1552/54-1618) The hyphenated man. During his life he played so many roles, that at the end he was able to look back and see it as a series of performances. It’s perhaps ironic that while his date of birth may be disputed, the place time and manner of his dying could probably be noted exactly. Even his execution had elements of performance.
May 21, 2020•40 sec•Ep. 132
Robert Graves (1895-1985) There’s almost a sub genre of poems in English about Ulysses. They would make a fascinating anthology. and I’m steadily adding them to The Poetry Voice index. But in these poems Ulysses is usually heroic or admirable. Most often he’s someone to sympathise with. This poem is unsual in the way it treats its hero. Graves fancied himself as a classicist. He also had an independent and often idiosyncratic view of the world.
May 14, 2020•1 min•Ep. 131
W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) A private joke made public? A painful truth? A cruel observation. A neat poem. One of the Intriguing aspects of Yeats’ output is that alongside the esoteric complications and the political and public poems, he could write, and publish something like this.
May 07, 2020•46 sec•Ep. 130
This is taken from Lady Godiva and Me. My Leofric is not Tennyson’s. Nor is he, at this point of the sequence, the historical Earl anymore than Lady G is either the Historical Godgifu or the legendary Godiva. Leofric is the one who stands and waits, hoping his lady will return. Hoping that being devoted in some way cuts him from the crowd, and knowing that it rarely does. Lady Godiva and Me is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry, from its earliest Roman beginnings to the ...
Apr 30, 2020•38 sec•Ep. 129
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) The reception and treatment of Plath’s poetry has been affected by the details of her life to an extent that is unusual. But if you ignore the gravitational pull of the biography and the polemics, what you’re left with is a superb poet who produced some fine poems. Although he was talking about Robert Graves, Sir Geoffrey Hill’s suggestion that great art is produced when trauma and technique are in balance applies to Plath. in some other poems, and in some of her most fa...
Apr 23, 2020•1 min•Ep. 128
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) RTE produced a box set of cds of Heaney reading his collected poems. And once you’ve heard him read them, they never sound right in any other voice. I’m no longer sure if it’s the poem or my memory of his performance which I admire.
Apr 16, 2020•58 sec•Ep. 127
Robert Browning (1812-1889) Reading aloud forces choices on the reader which are left unstated when the poem is read quietly. How does one read the last line of this poem? Is the speaker surprised, received disappointed? On the page they are all possible. Even the best reader has to choose. And for that reason I have been avoiding this poem for far too long. Browning was the master of the dramatic monologue. And he perfected what we might loosely call ‘performative dissonance’. What is being sai...
Apr 08, 2020•3 min•Ep. 126
I am a life long devotee of the ‘Traditional folk song’. This poem is dedicated, without irony, ‘For the Ballad singers, with gratitude and affection.’ But I don’t like Broken Token Songs, even if some of them have the best tunes. In this particular sub set of the folk genre, a girl, we shall call her Sweet Dotty, is usually walking in her garden, or down by a river, when a stranger arrives and propositions her. She says she is waiting for Sweet William to return from the wars, from sea, and she...
Apr 01, 2020•3 min•Ep. 125
Basil Bunting (1900-1985) This poem makes an interesting contrast with Louise MacNeice’s Thalassa. The poet may be an experienced sailor (Bunting was) and he may be talking to his boat, but there’s a sense of defeat here lacking in MacNeice’s poem. The epigraph to this poem is ‘Perche no Spero’, because there is no hope, which I left out of the reading for no other reason than I forgot to read it.
Mar 25, 2020•1 min•Ep. 123
John Agard (1949-) My first encounter with John Agard’s poetry was his collection ‘Love Lines for a Goat-Born Lady’. I don’t know if I’d read Grace Nichols first and then read John Agard because they were married or if it were the other way round and it really didn’t matter. They were both eye opening. When 'Milk and Honey’ by Rupi Kaur recently went mega on the best seller lists, journalists tied themselves in knots trying to explain the book’s baffling popularity. It was direct. it was immedia...
Mar 18, 2020•1 min•Ep. 122
John Clare (1793-1864) Clare is one of the contested figures in the ‘Romantic Movement’. He has the credentials, a farm labourer, his nature poetry was based on detailed observation of the world around him, he was mostly self educated and he ended his life in what was then called a lunatic asylum. But his poetry sits awkwardly against his more well known and better connected peers. His ‘nature poetry’ reads like the product of man who had lived and worked in the landscapes he described. Attempts...
Mar 11, 2020•1 min•Ep. 121
W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting proposition. If it’s one of your favourites, and you don’t like my reading, I apologise. Paradoxically, the poem works so well because although it mentions specific places, you’d never know who the Irish Airman was or in which war he was fighting from the poem alone. It’s this delicate mix of the general and specific, combined with Yeats’ superb phras...
Mar 04, 2020•53 sec•Ep. 120
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) Peter McDonald printed this as as the last poem in his edition of MacNeice’s ‘Collected poems’. It has an attractive combination of elegy and defeat and determination. Thalassa is the Greek word for the sea. For a classicist like MacNeice, it’s overloaded with connotations. From Xenaphon and his ragged army, desperately trying to get home, to the image of ageing Ulysses, pushing out on one more journey. This is taken from McDonald’s beautiful edition of MacNeice, ‘Coll...
Feb 27, 2020•57 sec•Ep. 119
Rumplestiltskin. This is my favourite story told by the Grimm brothers. Their version is a masterpiece of narrative economy. If you’ve read the earlier French version you can only admire how much has been stripped out by the time they got to it. Like most folk stories it won’t survive logical scrutiny, but it moves so swiftly you don’t have time to stop and consider how strange it is, or how inconsistent when you’re going along with the story. So here is the Ugly Little Man, Rumplestiltskin hims...
Feb 20, 2020•2 min•Ep. 118
Percy Shelley (1792-1822) Change the date, or change country and date. Some things don’t change much. Though the hopeful ending is getting harder to believe in. It was Shelley who claimed that Poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. If he really believed such mellifluous waffle he was delusional. He may have been outraged by the Peterloo Massacre, but sitting in his garden in Italy, writing this sonnet which wasn’t published til 1839 didn’t help the families of the poor or ma...
Feb 18, 2020•1 min•Ep. 117
Robert Burns (1759-1796) One of the glories of English poetry, or poetry in English, is the short lyric. There are thousands of them, and some of them, like this one, are excellent. A memorable statement of a commonplace idea which is not undermined by the knowledge that the poet probably got bored of the original addressee and tried the poem out on someone else. When Richard Tottel printed the first anthology of poetry in English, in 1557, he was almost apologetic about publishing short poems. ...
Feb 13, 2020•45 sec•Ep. 116
Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) One of the most popular English language poets of the twentieth century. His collected poems sold over two million copies. One of the nastier assumptions about modern poetry is that it’s not possible to be popular and good. Great poets have five readers and an academic following. Popular poets have either no talent or have prostituted themselves to find an audience. As an assumption it’s both nasty and dangerous. Betjeman was popular and good. Some of his poems, lik...
Feb 11, 2020•3 min•Ep. 115
George Gascoigne (1535-1578) I know very little about George Gascoigne, and looking him up on line hasn’t added much to that. But I do like this poem for its combination of weary resignation and sly humour. And poems like this are the reason why good anthologies are so valuable. I found this one in Seven Centuries of Poetry in English, edited by John Leonard. A lot can be said against anthologies, but a good one, like Seven Centuries, is a great place to start if you’re curious about poetry writ...
Feb 06, 2020•2 sec•Ep. 114
Robert Graves (1895-1985) The ‘Greek Version’, which is the ‘historical version’ is that in 490 BCE, the citizens of Athens and some allies defeated a numerically superior Persian army at Marathon. In doing so they stopped the first Persian attempt to conquer Greece. Marathon became a symbol of small nations fighting for freedom against overwhelming odds. Graves was having fun imagining the Persian Version of events. It may not be funny in a world where armies can advance towards the rear, where...
Feb 04, 2020•54 sec•Ep. 113
Liam Guilar The most frightening ghost stories I’ve encountered were told around the table by my English Grandmother and my Irish Father. There was no attempt to ‘be frightening. They both believed in the truth of the stories they were telling. This one scared me most because it didn’t finish. It seemed to be all detail and no story. Years later, when I remembered to ask her what was under the floorboards, the answer was long and involved and didn’t seem to belong to this story. The poem is take...
Jan 30, 2020•1 min•Ep. 112
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) Student: Sir! Is he trying to get her clothes off….? Me:…. Student: It’s not gonna work is it? If it’s not surprising that so many English poems seem to have a speaker, usually male, addressing someone, usually female, and trying to get them to undress, what is remarkable is how many of those speakers are doomed to failure if the poem is all they’ve got. And this is one of the most famous examples. Was any woman ever seduced by being told; ‘You’ll be dead soon, in the ...
Jan 28, 2020•2 min•Ep. 111
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) Form became a fetish in some kingdoms of poetry world in the later twentieth century. Creative writing students practised Sestinas and Villanelles, and some of them produced technically proficient examples. Most of them were immediately forgettable, and if you enjoy trivial pursuits a good question is 'Name three great villanelles written in the twentieth century'. What the festishists ignored, forgot or didn’t know what that form is never the whole story. You can teach ...
Jan 23, 2020•1 min•Ep. 110
Robert Service (1874-1958) You could turn your nose up at Robert Service and his poems. He called them verse, poetry was something other people wrote. He pads his lines, he isn’t afraid to use a cliche when it fits, and the rhythm often seems to be only on nodding terms with the sense. He’s old fashioned. Out of date. etc etc. And this poem is haunted by the ghost of a much greater one. But turning your nose up at Service is just silly. His poems were written to be recited, and reading them alou...
Jan 21, 2020•6 min•Ep. 109
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) One of the underrated poets of the twentieth century. A fine critic, an entertaining writer of prose and a fine poet, (unfairly I think) overshadowed in the history books by his friend W.H. Auden. Perhaps his reputation also suffers because although Irish, he lived most of his life in England. So he misses out on the club value of ‘Irish Poet’ while remaining outside the charmed circle of “English Poets’. This is not one of the poems I’d offer as proof of his excellenc...
Jan 15, 2020•57 sec•Ep. 108
Basil Bunting (1900-1985) Nasty little words, nasty long words, it's unhealthy. I want to wash when I meet a poet. They're Reds, addicts, all delinquents. What you write is rot. You can enjoy this poem as a joke, or as a caricature of a very common attitude towards poetry. Writing is not work in the way being a bus conductor is work, and if the ten year old son can do it and rhyme, and the school teacher thinks that the poetry isn’t good, and after all, school teachers know about this stuff, wha...
Jan 14, 2020•1 min•Ep. 107
