A Good Old Poets And Poetry Thread

[Albatross454]

Hello mumsnetties! I got a bit bored as Dc are at friends house. Just wanted to chat about poetry :) Who are your favourite poets, and why? What are your favourite facts? Are there films about them etc? I love the romantic poets, my favourite is Shelley, haha!

One of my favourites by Norman Maccaig: Memoriam

Everywhere she dies. Everywhere I go she dies.
No sunrise, no city square, no lurking beautiful mountain
but has her death in it.
The silence of her dying sounds through
the carousel of language, it’s a web
on which laughter stitches itself. How can my hand
clasp another’s when between them
is that thick death, that intolerable distance?

She grieves for my grief. Dying, she tells me
that bird dives from the sun, that fish
leaps into it. No crocus is carved more gently
than the way her dying
shapes my mind. – But I hear, too,
the other words,
black words that make the sound
of soundlessness, that name the nowhere
she is continuously going into.

Ever since she died
she can’t stop dying. She makes me
her elegy. I am a walking masterpiece,
a true fiction
of the ugliness of death.
I am her sad music.

These are making me shiver.

I love this one by Liz Lochead

Box Room

First the welcoming. Smiles all round. A space
For handshakes. Then she put me in my place –
(Oh, with concern for my comfort). ‘This room
Was always his – when he comes home
It’s here for him. Unless of course,’ she said,
‘He brings a Friend.’ She smiled ‘I hope the bed
Is soft enough? He’ll make do tonight
In the lounge on the put-u-up. All right
For a night or two. Once or twice before
He’s slept there. It’ll all be fine I’m sure –
Next door if you want to wash your face.’
Leaving me ‘peace to unpack’ she goes. My weekend case
(Lightweight, glossy, made of some synthetic
Miracle) and I are left alone in her pathetic
Shrine to your lost boyhood. She must
Think she can brush off time with dust
From model aeroplanes. I laugh it off in self defence,
Who have come for a weekend to state my permanence.

Peace to unpack – but I found none
In this spare room which once contained you. (Dun-
Coloured walls, one small window which used to frame
Your old horizons). What can I blame
For my unrest, insomnia? Persistent fear
Elbows me, embedded deeply here
In an outgrown bed (Narrow, but no narrower
Than the single bed we sometimes share).
On every side you grin giltedged from long-discarded selves
(But where do I fit into the picture?) Your bookshelves
Are crowded with previous prizes, a selection
Of plots grown thin. Your egg collection
Shatters me – (plover, robin, songthrush, magpie,
Wren, assorted seabirds) labelled carefully, sucked dry
Years ago – that now you have no interest
In. (You just took one from each, you never wrecked a nest,
You said). Invited guest among abandoned objects, my position
Is precarious, closeted so – it’s dark, your past a premonition
I can’t close my eyes to. I shiver despite
The electric blanket and the deceptive mildness of the night.

Yay poetry! I am a bit fan of Stevie Smith, Louis MacNeice, Yeats and Blake. Seamus Heaney rubs me up the wrong way a bit as does Wilfred Owen. Really like this one of MacNeices:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Has anyone got the Rattle Bag? So many cool poems in there.