With Our Great Pleasure

Thanks to Mr P for sending me back to Hardy.  Here are three of my favourites. As far as the first is concerned, walking in Bradford city centre when I was in my early twenties, I experienced the shock as I glanced into a shop window and recognised my Dad's face walking along with me.  That was not such a welcome recognition as when once much later, after his death, he walked alongside me in a dream and his loving presence was extremely welcome and needed. If you have not heard of read 'The Ruined Maid' you might not know just how funny Hardy can be. HEREDITY I am the family face;  Flesh perishes, I live on,  Projecting trait and trace  Through time to times anon,  And leaping from place to place  Over oblivion.  The years-heired feature that can  In curve and voice and eye  Despise the human span  Of durance -- that is I;  The eternal thing in man,  That heeds no call to die  I AM THE ONE...

Thank you Jill for sending another Sheenagh Pugh poem. Much appreciated! TWO MILES BELOW Two miles below the light, bacteria live without sun, thrive on sulphur in a cave of radioactive rock, and, blind in the night of the ocean floor, molluscs that feed only on wood wait for wrecks. White tubeworms heap in snowdrifts around hydrothermal vents, at home in scalding heat. Lichens encroach on Antarctic valleys where no rain ever fell. There is nowhere life cannot take hold, nowhere so salt, so cold, so acid, but some chancer will be there, flourishing on bare stone, getting by, gleaning a sparse living from marine snow, scavenging light from translucent quartz, as if lack and hardship could do nothing but quicken it, this urge to cling on in the cracks of the world, or as if this world itself, so various, so not to be spared as it is, were the impetus never to leave it. Sheenagh Pugh From Short Days, Long Shadows (Seren, £9.99) Sheenagh Pugh

Last week's edition of  'Poetry Please'  collected together poems about children read out during 'Children in Need' day on Radio Four.  There were smashing readings from Ian McKellan ('Timothy Winters' by Charles Causley), Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Philip Pullman and many others including several children. I think they should also have included  'Poem for Connie' by Chloe Evans . Best of all of the readings I loved Maxine Peake's reading of 'This Be the Worst', the balancing pastiche to Philip Larkin's notorious 'This Be the Verse' - a reminder of what all parents would want to do if sometimes they fall short. This Be the Worst They tuck you up, your mum and dad, They read you Peter Rabbit, too. They give you all the treats they had And add some extra, just for you. They were tucked up when they were small, (Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke), By those whose kiss healed any fall, Whose laughter doubled any j...

The practice of medicine is difficult, sometimes overwhelmingly so.  When medical students or young doctors came to the end of their time with me I would give them a photocopy of this poem to remind them that they will never be left alone in their labours, confusion and  feelings of helplessness. There are always allies, often in the shadows, but powerful and benevolent.  All they demand is to be recognised and invited in. I swear by the music I swear by the music of the expanding universe and by the eloquence of the good in all of us that I will excite the sick and the well by the severity of my kindness to a wholeness of purpose. I shall apply my knowledge, curiosity, ignorance and ability to listen. I shall co-operate with wondering practitioners in the arts and sciences, with all those who care for people's bodies and souls, so that the whole person in relationship shall be kept in view, their aspirations and their unease. The secrets of th...

I wish I had been able to see this poem in full colour, but I still think it works in black and white?         FIREWORK POEMS (commissioned by the Salisbury Festival to be displayed in fireworks)        I         FASTER AND FASTER,        THEY VANISH INTO DARKNESS        OUR YEARS TOGETHER        II        WRITE IT IN FIRE ACROSS THE NIGHT        SOME MEN ARE MORE OR LESS ALL RIGHT And as a little extra... Being Boring 'May you live in interesting times.' Chinese curse If you ask me 'What's new?', I have nothing to say Except that the garden is growing. I had a slight cold but it's better today. I'm content with the way things are going. Yes, he is the same as he usually is, Still eating and sleeping and snoring. I get on with my work. He gets on with his. I know this is all...

I am not entirely sure that it is Wendy's poem but definitely in her style, voice and subjects. Corrections please if I am wrong... AS WELL AS THE BIBLE AND SHAKESPEARE...? You are what                          I would choose                                                                                          for companion in the desert.                                                You would know the way out,                                               ...

Teresa bought me the Complete Poems twenty five years ago - a superb collection, I could select so many more to include here including his perhaps most famous poem 'Walking Away' which I have blogged at least once before and given to many friends over the years.  I didn't remember 'My Méséglise Way' when I was skimming the volume for the purpose of this post and realize that was because my first reading would have been before I had read 'In Search of Lost Time' and didn't know the reference. It is interesting that like 'Children Leaving Home' (first published posthumously) he wrote this poem towards the end of the life. In Proust, the Narrator as small boy, meets Gilberte, daughter of Charles and Odette Swann by the river that flows by the 'Méséglise Way' - it is an epiphany and the start of his 'sentimental education'. Not one to rush through a very, very good book, he meets her again three thousand pages or so down the line......

Roy - father of John Fuller - was something of a hero to me in the way that he went about his poetry. Probably when he died in 1991, I found out that he had written most of his work (rising at 5am) before he went off to work as a solicitor at the Woolwich Building Society. He had various jobs including a radar mechanic and an officer in the Royal Navy.  . At the last,he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford: I wonder what hours he worked there? Do they have perhaps a clocking in machine? How do they check that when he is sat there with a pencil in his hand, scratching himself, that it is a verse on his mind and not a shopping list? I have a collection of Roy's poems copied out by hand in my commonplace book. These two are particular favourites. DUTCH SCHOOL The hidden symbolism of the real! It seems that Dutchmen painted them long ago Ostensibly commonplace interiors But in the shadows hands touched guilty things And even some lighted gesture sent unease, Adjacent to ...

This poem illustrates perfectly John Fenton's view that "a good poem takes some irresolvable complication, worries it to death like a dog with a bone, and leaves it still unresolved. The pleasure of the poem lies entirely in the worrying, the verbal growling and play. Life itself stubbornly remains entirely like a bone.”  ALL THE MEMBERS OF MY TRIBE ARE LIARS Think of a self-effacing missionary  Tending the vices of a problem tribe.  He knows the quickest cure for beri-beri  And how to take a bribe.  And so the mind will never say it’s beaten  By primitive disturbance of the liver;  Its logic will prevent its being eaten,  Get it across the river.  But faced with this assured inconsequence  That damns the very method that is used,  It leaves the heart unproselytised and hence  Admits that it’s confused.  I know I’m acting, but I still must act.  I melt to foolishness, and want it ended.  Why...

FINAL AUTUMN Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard. Light drives lower and one bluejay crams our cold memories out past the sun, each time your traces come past the shadows and visit under my looking-glass fingers that lift and block out the sun. Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn, and you can trace your last homecoming into the snow or the sun.

A lovely poem about give and take. THE THRUSH When Winter's ahead, What can you read in November That you read in April When Winter's dead? I hear the thrush, and I see Him alone at the end of the lane Near the bare poplar's tip, Singing continuously. Is it more that you know Than that, even as in April, So in November, Winter is gone that must go? Or is all your lore Not to call November November, And April April, And Winter Winter—no more? But I know the months all, And their sweet names, April, May and June and October, As you call and call I must remember What died into April And consider what will be born Of a fair November; And April I love for what It was born of, and November For what it will die in, What they are and what they are not, While you love what is kind, What you can sing in And love and forget in All that's ahead and behind.

James Wright , Pulitzer Prize winning poet was born in Martins Ferry in 1927. He suffered from bipolar disorder and alcoholism and died in 1980. AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO In the Shreve High football stadium,  I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,  And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,  And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,  Dreaming of heroes.  All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,  Their women cluck like starved pullets,  Dying for love.  Therefore,  Their sons grow suicidally beautiful  At the beginning of October,  And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

THE BLACK BEACH (Skogarstrand, South Iceland) Nobody told us it was going to be black. Day at the beach, see the puffins, fine and there it was,    black.    Not streaked with coal, nor shaly, nor polluted; just pure ash as fine as sand, running through our hands and leaving no mark where we looked to see a sooty smudge; uncanny like a man without footprints. The sea creamed in, bone-white, startling; edging with lace the black velvet. You could have sat down, but no one did: no-one picnicked or made sand-pies of the stuff. It was beautiful, really beautiful, that stretch of darkness, but people trod it as if they were walking  iver their graves. A seal's shining head surfaced close; seemed to look, then sheered off. LOVE Bjarni drive the bus through fields of black volcanic lava crusted with new moss for visiting Americans who see his country through the newest Leica lens. Bjarni's eyes are never on the road; at every momen...

From the 1937  'Letters from Iceland'  by Auden and Louis MacNeice based on their visit to Iceland the year before. And here is Auden  reading it. Journey To Iceland And the traveller hopes: “Let me be far from any  Physician”; and the ports have names for the sea;         The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow;         And North means to all: “Reject”. And the great plains are for ever where cold creatures are hunted,  And everywhere; the light birds flicker and flaunt;         Under a scolding flag the lover         Of islands may see at last, Faintly, his limited hope; as he nears the glitter  Of glaciers; the sterile immature mountains intense         In the abnormal day of this world, and a river’s         Fan-like polyp of sand. Then let the good citizen here find natural marvels:...

Another poem that has lasted the course: first read in my 1967 copy of the 'Oxford Book of English Verse', it never fails to create a sense of optimism and purpose. FANFARE FOR THE MAKERS A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what? To the small fire that never leaves the sky. To the great fire that boils the daily pot. To all the things we are not remembered by, Which we remember and bless. To all the things That will not notice when we die, Yet lend the passing moment words and wings. So fanfare for the Makers: who compose A book of words or deeds who runs may write As many who do run, as a family grows At times like sunflowers turning towards the light. As sometimes in the blackout and the raids One joke composed an island in the night. As sometimes one man’s kindness pervades A room or house or village, as sometimes Merely to tighten screws or sharpen blades Can catch a meaning, as to hear the chimes At midnight means to share them, as one man In ol...

A few hours after publishing my  last post - a poem by John Burnside  the Saturday postman brings me the new 'London Review of Books' - and naturally there are two brand new poems by John. Both are very good; this is the most striking, returning as if by compulsion to the notion of the anima, 'the eternal feminine'; its plasticity and protean nature in the affairs of poets - and men. SILKIE At midnight when I rise, insomniac, and go down to the kitchen, for a glass of water (bars of moonlight in the blinds, the wall clock  halted months ago, at 7.10) I know that, by the force of some new geography that I have yet to learn, a woman will be standing at the sink, gutting a bowl of codfish, the broken scales stick on her fingers, her eyes a blue, in this light, that no one has seen before; and this is where the cruelty begins, in cleverness and lust and frayed desire, not for this creature, who runs from the ache of the sea, then fritters away the...

From John's 2007 collection, 'Gift Songs'.  I am not sure that recovering Catholics ever believe that the body is more than an obstruction to the passage and welfare of the soul: it is good, if salutary, to be reminded of the imperial power of flesh and blood, with its own agenda, demands and destiny. THE BODY AS METAPHOR We only imagine it ends like childhood, or rain: fever, the purl in the bone, the amended lustre of the self, all shell and glitter, as if it had long been decided that flesh is a journey, something immense in the blood, like a summer of locusts, or something not quite visible, but quick as birchseed or the threading of a wire through sleep and rapture, gathering the hand that reaches from the light, to close or open.

If the chanting of  'Cargoes'  was the opening of a door at primary school, then hearing the voice of Dylan Thomas at grammar school was another epiphany.  We enjoyed the privilege of having Mr Leadbetter as our English Lit and Language teacher at St Bede's all the way through to GCEs: a happy, self assured chap with a determination and need to show us what English was capable of. He was one of those teachers who had a natural authority because of his intelligence and manifest good nature: he knew his worth to us and we recognised it in return. Early on, with the help of the latest technology of the time (a gramophone) he played a recording of 'Fern Hill' and the world has never been the same since.  It comes to mind as I was sorting out the last of my vinyl records today - on their way to the Oxfam shop in Ulverston if you are interested. 'Fern Hill' is on the 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' album.  FERN HILL Now as I was young and e...

I am going to duck out on an introduction for these most famous words and leave it to Aubrey Lewis via Anthony Clare. I will put my own sixpennorth in at the end though for what it is worth. Professor Clare appeared on Radio Four's 'With Great Pleasure' in 1985. Some of you will remember his long running series 'In The Psychiatrist's Chair'? Here are his concluding remarks to his own collection that also included Eliot's 'Journey of the Magi', 'The Second Coming' by Yeats, John Clare's 'Written in Northampton County Asylum'. "I intended to end my selection with Emily Dickinson, a poet who more than once concerned herself with medicine and madness. It was she who wrote: Faith is a fine convention For gentlemen who see; But microscopes are prudent In an emergency. As fine a comment on the limits of belief and usefulness of science as I know. But my last choice is Shakespeare. Having once seen Gielgud as Prospero, ...

Tomorrow night (12th August) weather permitting, we will sit out in the garden on our loungers to watch the big night of return of the Perseid shower - an annual ritual of ours.  This is the sort of thing that can happen. Stargazing The night is fine and dry. It falls and spreads the cold sky with a million opposites that, for a spell, seem like a million souls and soon, more, and then, for what seems a long time, one. Then of course it spins. What is better to do than string out over the infinite dead spaces the ancient beasts and spearmen of the human mind, and if not the real ones, new ones? But try making them clear to one you love, (whoever is standing by you is one you love  when pinioned by the stars): you will find it quite impossible, but like her more for thinking she sees that constellation. After the wave of pain, you will turn to her and, in an instant, change the universe to a sky you were glad you came out to see. This is the act of the ...