The Poetry Voice

R.S. Thomas' 'Mice'

Luis Quintais' 'Amphitheatre' (trans Lesley Saunders)

Luis Quintais (1968-) You can read about Luis Quintais, a poet writing in Portuguese as well as this translation and four other others by clicking on the link below. It will open in a new page.. https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/15/poems-by-luis-quintais-translated-from-the-portuguese-by-lesley-saunders/ This is a good example of what happens when one fine poet translates another. We live in a great age of translation. Which means we have access to poetry in languages you’ve probably never conside...

Liam Guilar's 'After the Funerals'

This poem is taken from 'Rough Spun to Close Weave'. A listener asked for the text of the poem as well. After the Funerals one by one they take their leave; parting without formal courtesies startled by the shock, again, as one by one they take their leave. Affection, understanding, even knowing what there was to value, come too late: gifts delivered past their use by dates. 2 The plane strains upwards in the night, banks, and there, below the city that we thought we knew; drab streets, a park, ...

Hafez 'What memories' (trans Dick Davis)

Hafez, 1315 (?) -1398/90) We live in a great age of translation, and there's no excuse for not exploring poetries other than English. Hafez is one of the world’s great poets, in one of the history’s great literatures, and Dick Davis is one of the great translators. Ironically i first came across both of them in an essay Davis wrote called ‘On not Translating Hafez’. This poem is taken from Davis’ ‘Faces of Love: Hafez and the poets of Shiraz’ Mage Publishers 2012/2019

from Prudentius' 'Hamartigenia'. On Free Will.

‘Prudentius’, Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. (348-405?) Originally written in Latin, this poem was part of a contemporary theological argument. This sounds dour, but it rocks along in Martha M. Malamud’s translation. The section I’ve read here is about free will. Prudentius argues that when God gave man power over the beasts, he also gave him power over himself. The first five or so lines I’ve read here present the point of view that Prudentius is arguing against. Therefore good and evil are choic...

Jeremy Hooker's 'Novelty'

Jeremy Hooker (born 1941) I don't often read two consecutive poems from the same poet, but I wanted to hear this one. It's taken from Hooker's 'Selected Poems (1965-2018)' published 2020 by Shearsman books

Jeremy Hooker's 'Gull on a Post'

Jeremy Hooker (Born 1941) Shearsman published Hooker’s Selected poems (1965-2018) in 2020. It’s an impressive body of work, through provoking, moving, and very enjoyable to read. I like the way this poem uses a single, familiar (If you live near the coast) image to explore a complex idea, and resists the temptation to shut down the exploration with a neat conclusion. I also like the way the poem never loses sight of the physical world. The gull and the post are always a gull and a post, carefull...

Lewis Carroll's 'You are Old Father William'

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) Like many things in Alice in Wonderland, this was a parody, but the target has long been consigned to the footnotes. It is what it is: Carroll’s control of rhyme and rhythm seems effortless. It’s certainly enviable. And the poem is memorably funny. I’m probably not the only one to remember hearing ‘I have answered three questions and that is enough’ or ‘be off and don’t give yourself airs’ quoted by an exasperated adult.

William Wordsworth's 'The world is too much with us'. (Any requests?)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) ‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’. Says it all really. This reading was a request. Which reminds me to point out that if you have a poem you’d like to hear read on the Podcast you can send your request via the contact form on www.liamguilar.com or to my author page on facebook. Some poems don’t work well read aloud, and some just don’t work when I read them. I can’t promise there will be no parrots, dogs or traffic in the background, but i’ll see what ...

Meirion Jordan's 'Arawn Lord of Annwn'

Meirion Jordan (Born 1985) This is the second of two readings of poems based on the Welsh prose Mabinogion. This is taken from Meirion Jordan’s ‘Regeneration/Redbook’. While Mathew Francis retells the stories, (see previous Podcast) Jordan uses his poems to respond to them. Based on the stories, but treating them aslant, his poems raise the question of whether a poem like this works if you don’t know the story. Or even if they do work when you do know the background. In the Mabinogion Arawn appe...

from Mathew Francis' 'The Mabinogi' Rhiannon's arrival

This extract is taken from ‘The Mabinogi’, (Faber 2017), Francis’ retelling of the first four stories in the collection of eleven Medieval Welsh prose stories printed in English as The Mabinogion. The Mabinogi is the name given to the first four stories. In this extract from the first story, Pwyll, who is prince of Dyfed, has been told that if he sits on Gorsedd Arberth, a hill overlooking his court, one of two things will happen: wounds or blows, or he will see a wonder. Because he is with an a...

Dick Davis' 'A Translator's Nightmare'

Dick Davis (Born 1945) Widely regarded as the leading English translator of Persian Poetry, Davis is also a fine poet, as his Collected poems, ‘Love in Another Language’, demonstrates. In this poem his fluency with rhyming couplets allows the humour of the nightmare to swing. And the humour doesn’t hide the serious point that’s being made, that no matter how good the translator, there must be times when he or she wonders what would happen if they met up with their source in the hereafter. And th...

Liam Guilar's 'Just once'

‘Coke’ in this sense, is fuel for a fire. Thought cleaner than coal, it was much harder to light. This poem is taken from Rough Spun to Close Weave which is still available from online booksellers or direct from the shop on WWW.Liamguilar.com.

John Keats' 'When I have fears that I may cease to be'.

John Keats (1795-1821) Sometimes poetry is the memorable expression of a commonplace thought. Keats, more than most, was haunted by the threat of an early death. A dedicated poet, he wanted to be ‘amongst the English poets at my death’. He died of Tuberculosis, in his mid twenties, a long way from home, coughing his lungs up in a rented room in Italy and he felt he’d failed. The epitaph he choose for himself, ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’, sums up his disappointment. Amongst the u...

George Herbert's 'The Collar'

George Herbert 1593-1633 Herbert was a priest, and his poetry has been described as ‘some of the most moving devotional poetry in the English Language’. But often, as in this poem, the relationship between priest and god, is strained. ‘The collar’ runs on a series of puns, some depending on spellings and usage which are not longer current, and which may not be evident in a reading. A collar was a yoke, but also a priest’s collar, a sign of service. It’s also a way of being caught, and an aural p...

Alfred De Musset's 'On a Dead Woman' (Sur une Morte)

Alfred De Musset (1810-1857) The woman in question was not dead. According to the translator, Stanley Appelbaum, ‘The ‘Morte’ of the poem, the Princess Belgiojoso, was not at all dead but coquettishly indifferent to the poet’s advances.’ This is taken from “Introduction to French Poetry’ edited by Stanley Appelbaum, who claims in his introduction that the translations are ‘definitely not intended to be poetic recreations of the original works, but merely aids to the understanding of the content’...

The Archpoet's confession

The Archpoet (12th century) ‘The Archpoet’ is the name given to a writer of a handful of Latin lyrics of which this ‘Confession’ is the most famous. Almost nothing is known about his identity or the details of his life. Imagine a priest or monk, accused of a string of vices. The ‘Confession’ confronts the accusations and gleefully admits to them all. There’s a debate about whether it’s genuinely autobiographical or a rhetorical exercise, and that is unlikely to be answered. But the poem was popu...

Rudyard Kipling's 'If'

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) There was a time poems entered the language and were recycled in daily usage. And ‘If’ is perhaps one of the best examples of such a poem. It has been voted Britain’s Most popular poem, though I suspect that day has passed. It’s full of good advice, memorably expressed. Nowhere does it suggest you need counselling or a handbook of excuses. But I can also imagine a Victorian father giving his son such a lecture, and the son walking out thinking, well, that’s that then....

Federico Garcia Lorca's 'Somnambule Ballad'

Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) (Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L Gill) For those outside Spain, who read no Spanish, Lorca is probably the most famous Spanish poet of the twentieth century. This is a very different poem to the ones I’ve previously read on the podcast. It helps, listening to this poem or reading it, to remember Lorca was friends with Dali and Bunuel. There is a story that when those two were making 'Un Chien Andalou', their ground breaking surrealist film, one would sket...

from Christopher Logue's 'War Music' 2. The Death of Patroculus.

Christopher Logue (1926-2011) This is my second reading from ‘War Music’. In the first, Patroculus has begged Achilles for the loan of his armour. When Achilles reluctantly agrees, he insists that no matter how successful Patroculus is he must not chase the Trojans to their city. Apollo, the Mouse God, is present and on the Trojan’s side. After a day of staggering success, Patroculus ignores the interdiction and chases the Trojans to the walls of their city. This extract begins as he tries to sc...

from Christopher Logue's 'War Music'. 1 Patroculus pleads with Achilles.

Christopher Logue (1926-2011) A fine poet in his own work, Logue’s most lasting achievement should be his ‘account’ of Homer’s Iliad. He didn't called his work a translation. In 1959 he was asked to translate a section of the Iliad for a radio performance. In his memoire, ‘Prince Charming’ (p.221), he relates that when he pointed out he knew no Greek, he was told:. ‘Read translations by those who did. Follow the story. A translator must know one language well. Preferably his own.’ It is an unusu...

Ovid's 'Pygmalion' trans Arthur Golding

Arthur Golding (1536-1605) Publius Ovidius Naso (43 Bc-17/18 AD) Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’ written in Latin in the first decade of the First Century AD, long before England was invented, is ironically one of the key texts in English poetry and Ovid one of its most influential poets. One of the reasons for the popularity of the Metamorphosis after the Middle Ages is Golding’s translation, which influenced so many who read it, including one W. Shakespeare. The story of Pygmalion lives on in Shaw’s pl...

Sappho's 'Fragment 31'

Possibly the most famous female poet in history? Well known and highly respected in her own Greek culture. Her name is still very well known, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. Very little of her work survives, and most of it seems to be fragments. There are numerous attempts at translating this particular poem: Catullus, Campion, Bunting and others have done their best. I like this version because it respects the fragment and works as a poem. This is taken from Sappho, Poems and Fragments, t...

Charles Hamilton Sorley's 'When you see millions of the mouthless dead'

Sorely was killed by a sniper in 1915 while serving on the Western Front. This poem, written in pencil, was found amongst his belongings. The few poems he had written were collected and published in January 1916 as ‘Marlborough and other poems’. This is taken from the slightly enlarged second edition of February 1916. Had Sorely lived and continued to write, most of the poems in the book would probably have been filed away as ‘Juvenilia’. As it was, he didn’t get to revise any of them for public...

Lewis Carroll's 'The Walrus and the Carpenter'.

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) ‘Light verse’ is often a dismissive term. Light verse can be clever, witty, humorous, entertaining, memorable and enjoyable but Real Poetry should be serious, profound, ‘deep’, emotional….it’s a silly argument. Some of the best poetry of the 19th century is described as ‘light verse’, and Lewis Carroll wrote some of the best examples. Almost as silly as the dismissal of light verse is the inevitable attempt to find political, religious or ideological themes that would r...

Carol Ann Duffy's 'You'

Carol Ann Duffy (1955-) This is the first poem in Duffy’s ‘Rapture’ (2005), which is either a book length love poem or a book length sequence of poems which chart the rise and fall of a passionate love affair. ‘Rapture’ won the T.S.Eliot Prize in 2005. For many people the relationship between love and poetry seems a simple one. But of the thousands of poems written each day, and the thousands published each year, there are very few good love poems. As an experiment, pick up a general anthology o...

John Keats' 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'

John Keats In Tennyson’s Lady of Shalotte, the metaphor is buried by the story. In La Belle Dame sans Merci, the story is the metaphor. The narrative is as straightforward as a fairy tale, though it also reads like a nightmare. There are several suggestions as to what the story ‘means’: La Belle Dame is tuberculosis, Infatuation, Fanny Brawne, male fear of the feminine. You can take your pick. What Keats thought it meant is a different matter. The poem first appeared in a long letter he wrote to...

Thomas E. Spencer's 'How McDougall topped the score'

Thomas E. Spencer (1845-1911) I know nothing about Spenser except he wrote this poem and I own a signed, 1906 copy of ‘How McDougall Topped the Score and other sketches and verses’. I don’t even know why I have the book. According to Wikipedia Spencer migrated to Sydney, Australia in 1875 and became a successful builder and contractor, winning government contracts for work on Goulburn gaol, the University of Sydney's physics laboratory and the sewerage system in Sydney. ‘How McDougall Topped the...

Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shalott'

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) Another poem in which the poet has taken a story and adapted it. Tennyson was a great poet, if technique is a criteria of greatness. Try writing stanzas using the rhythm and rhyme scheme he does here and see how hard it is. He doesn’t put a foot wrong if you pronounce glow’d/trode/flow’d/rode to rhyme. There’s a sung version by Loreena Mckennit which brings out how melodious the lyric is far better than any reading can. But being a great technician is not everyth...

C.P. Cavafy's 'The God Abandons Anthony'

Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) This is the second of Cavafy’s poems on the Podcast. Like the first it plays off a classical story. In this case it takes an incident from Plutarch’s life of Anthony, and shifts from the particular historical event, when Anthony is supposed to have heard his patron God, DIonysus leaving the city, to a more universal poem about loss and defeat. How should you behave when faced with failure? The poem offers advice to an unnamed protagonist. Leonard Cohen used this po...