So what are your favourite poems, then? This means YOU, Quattro...

[Habbibu]

... and others, but Quattro in particular bemoaned the passing of poetry chat on MN. Anyway, for me I think it would be something by Derek Walcott - these are the poems I'm drawn to again and again - for example:

The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

So go on, what else do you like, and why?

Who requested some romantic Yeats?

He wishes for the cloths of heaven
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

-- William Butler Yeats

We've already had one from The World's Wife by Duffy (which I love, by the way) - here's one dedicated to all of MN:

Mrs Icarus

I?m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he?s a total, utter, absolute Grade A pillock.

Carol Ann Duffy.

habbibu/hathor/brokenrecord - can I ask, where do you find the things you like? - as I don't recognise them as anthology-standards, and it is so nice to find some new inspirations sometimes

Do you find something you like, and then follow up on everything else that person's written? (which is what I have been doing with John Ashbery) or do you read poetry magazines? Or are you involved in publishing? Love to know.

I can't stand Dylan T's voice...... so pompous.

I saw this thread yesterday and went to bed last night with Palgrave's Golden Treasury. It was marvellous.

2 sugars
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn by John Betjeman

first time i have read it 0 it is fantastic, thank you for introducing me to that

DS1 and I have been doing nature poems (DH has been doing extra maths with him so I feel I have to do my bit for lit!

He and I like this one, by Robert Frost:

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

Oh dear I hate to bring down that good mood, mmj but this is a bit of bleak Philip Larkin that always comes back to me when I go (as I just have) to the Yorkshire coast. The last four lines are as chilling as anything I know:

Next, Please

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead wit golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

oh ssb.

I find that one kind of haunting as well, mmj.

But he's not only miserable. I always think of The Whitsun Weddings when I'm on my way back from Howden to London:

www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7108

Actually I've just made myself cry, re-reading that .

Some of those were from a brlliant anthology that I had from school in the seventies. You can still get it second hand from amazon and other places 'Albatross book of verse' edited by Louis Untermeyer.

Others I've just picked up along the way - friends pointing them out etc.

I like poetry a lot -perhaps to compensate for my cloth ear for music

Slayerette: I literally cried laughing at that Duffy poem - I keep meaning to buy that collection and now I think I will.

Well, it's all relative, I guess .

Actually, I love Larkin. Maybe you have to have been incarcerated in East Yorkshire to appreciate him, though.

Off the point a bit, I haven't much liked childrens' anthologies of poetry much, but I really recommend this:

www.amazon.co.uk/Because-Fire-Was-My-Head/dp/0571216064

It has some funny poems and some quite adult ones, Yeats, etc. I read it with 9 year-old DD1 and she really likes it - she is quite bookish though, so it might not be for everyone.

Sorry .

Will piss off now.

I've always been a poetry person (bits go round in my head ALL the time), but generally anthologies rather than being brave and delving into non-pre-sifted stuff - though I have read completely everything of Wallace Stevens, including the marvels hidden in his prose writings in The Necessary Angel.

Funnily enough for me it's together with music - I've at last got the point of that in the last couple of years and am doing the "going right through all of Schumann's chamber music" type things - which is making me want to do the same completist immersion in particular writers. (And the music thing is making me hear metre much better.)

ssb - did Larkin have any influence on where you chose to go to college?? Did me.

aah!
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks upon storms ...

Just re-read my post:

'I haven't much liked childrens' anthologies much'....

That's poetry....