Some great poets mentioned above chaps. I too am a great lover of the form. Particular pleased to see Blake, Hughes, and Manley-Hopkins in the mix. Of those 3 I’d say Ted is the real powerhouse - he was perhaps the single greatest influence on my all time favourite poet - the current laureate, Simon Armitage. Just a personal view, but I reckon Armitage is the last great poet - nothing I’ve read in the last 20 or so years gets anywhere near his skill. If I had to choose one Armitage poem it would be The Tyre.
Blake was probably the first poet to actually inspire me - such was its resonance, I set his Schoolboy to music when I was indeed still a schoolboy in '81, and then resurrected it for a recording with Anti System in '83 - it featured on the '84 Pax Records comp Bollox to the Gonads Here’s the Testicles:
(Sorry about the apparent me me meness)
My go to Manley-Hopkins is Binsey Poplars - I’d say it’s fairly representative of his gorgeously musical alliterative voice - here’s its glorious first verse:
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank*.*
(the mise en page isn’t rendering correctly here)
Derek Mahon’s, A Disused Shed in County Wexford is brilliant, and worth showing here in its entirety:
Even now there are places where a thought might grow —
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped forever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,
Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.
They have been waiting for us in a [foetor](
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
of the expropriated [mycologist].
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.
There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door growing strong —
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.
A half century, without visitors, in the dark —
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like [triffids], racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’
Of course Seamus Heaney is masterful, his volumes fill my shelves too - like Hughes, there’s a fabulous muscularity to his poetry - though I chose his rather sweet Lupins (from Electric Light) as part of my eulogy for my mother. That said, even gentle-sounding verse can convey a much darker material - such as Heaney’s, Song:
A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
From my reading - the lipstick on the rowan is the blood from the back of the head of the unfortunate who was stood in front of the tree before a single bullet to the head ended that life! Quite powerful stuff - though Heaney really hits his stride with longer offerings such as Clearances.
The Liverpool Scene absolutely would have to feature in any serious discussion about poetry - so I’ll just drop them in here - their LPs are utterly fantastic things.
I could go on, and on, but that’s probably enough from me for now. However I will add that I’ve just started rereading Milton’s Paradise Lost - imo PL is best read aloud - it’s said to be blank verse, though it chimes and rings beautifully when you actually hear it - can’t remember who said (Empson, Leavis, or maybe even Wordsworth) that reading Milton is akin to chewing an apple - well one sure has to get those jaws working to bring Milton’s words off the page : )
Apols - when I went for the link to Schoolboy I was amazed to discover this cover version:
