W.B.Yeats' 'The Fisherman'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential.

At some point in his career Yeats had wanted to be a national poet, writing for and on behalf of his country. But in this poem he renounces that ambition, having, he says, discovered that the people he thought we was writing for and about are not worthy. He renounces them for an imaginary figure, a solitary fisherman. And in the poem’s most memorable image, Yeats hopes that before he’s old, he will have written him one poem ‘as cold/and passionate as the dawn’.

You can spend some time admiring those two adjectives, and the effect they create.

Hugh Kenner suggested the difference between Yeats and Pound, or Yeats and most poets, was that Pound, once he’d left London, could sit in relative isolation at his typewriter in Rapallo telling himself he was a genius and dismissing any rumours of negative response to his work as the sniping of lesser interigences. Yeats, standing in the wings at the abbey theatre was forced to confront an often baffled, sometimes hostile audience. It might be one of the reasons Yeats’ poems got better as he got older.

Jeremy Hooker's '1st of July 2016

Jeremy Hooker. (Born 1941)

I’m assuming this poem was written to commemorate the Hundredth Anniversary of the First Day of the Somme offensive in 1916. When i was at school we learnt the statistics; 60,00 casualties, 20, 00 of them dead. In one morning, between 7.30am and “lunch time”. By the end of the battle, which got them nowhere, when the snows closed it down in November, British, Empire and allied troops had suffered over half a million casualties.
While historians might debate the significance of the battle and the actual casuality figures, (57,470 of which 19,240 died). The image of men lined up in rows and ordered to advance into machine gun fire was a dark shadow on the collective imagination, made more terrible by the fact they were fighting in a ‘war to end wars’.

Hooker shows how effective a poem can be without the poet having to resort to distorted syntax, complex rhyme schemes or obscure allusions. The tragedy is summed up …’the old men/that we knew and the young men/we did not.’ The poem also deftly suggests a difference between then and now in its play on ‘divisions.’

The poem is taken from Hooker’s excellent ‘Word and Stone’ (Sheearsman 2019).

Liam Guilar's 'Akhmatova's requiem'

I read the poem Requiem by Anna Akhmatova on a previous podcast.

Several things made this poem happen. WHile Akhmatova lived through Stalin’s times, many of the people who persecuted her are now forgotten, they are just ‘footnotes in her history’.

I used her poem as part of a unit on poetry in translation. I would tell the story of how, when it was being written, she would write the new verses on cigarette paper. She would show them silently to her friend, who would nod when she had memorised the lines, then they would burn the paper.

Classes often found this most moving part of her story.

But at the end of every lesson, there’d be at least one of the printed copies of the poem left in the classroom, often dropped on the floor. Once one of the papers had a foot print on it.

The poem first appeared in the Irish Journal , The SHOp, and was then chosen for ‘The SHOp, An Anthology of Poetry’, their ‘best of’ collection.

Patrick Kavanagh's 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin..'

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)

Clicking the Kavanagh tag at the bottom of the page will take you to a reading of ‘Kerr’s Ass’.

The full title of this poems is: 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal , Dublin, 'Erected to the memory of Mrs Dermot O'Brien' It belongs to a cluster he wrote later in life, and his friends took him at his word, clubbed together and made him a memorial which you can see in the picture.

One cold December day in Dublin, before google maps, I set out to walk to the canal to find the statue. I found it, and Raglan Road which is near by, but that bench seat is metal. You have to be dedicated to sit there long enough to have your photo taken when the temperature is hovering round zero. .

Alun Lewis' 'The Swan's way'

Alun Lewis (1915-1944)

Considered by some one of the few great poets to serve and write during the second world war.

This is his take on the myth of Leda and the Swan. Zeus turns himself into a swan to rape leda, and Helen of Troy is born. It’s been a subject in art since Classical times.

Yeats wrote a fine poem on the same subject. But in Lewis’ version the God disguised as Swan is stricken by an understanding of what he’s done. Such remorse rarely figures in either the pictures or the stories.

Liam Guilar's 'These heroics One and Two'.

Two poems, written some years apart.

The modern admiration for the action hero seems like a childish escape into fantasy, until you realise the implications. Real heroism, the courage to keep going on a daily basis where there is no simple victory, no cheering crowd, no prize, goes unnoticed.

These heroics number one is takes from I’ll Howl before you bury me. These heroics number two from Rough spun to Close Weave.

Both are still available from www.liamguilar.com

(A note on pronunciation. There are at least two ways of pronouncing Cuchulainn. I naturalised mine from Irish speakers I grew up with. At university I was told: ‘Oh Guilar, you mean Kah Hool lin’. He said it in such a patronising way, in his Bow Tie English Accent, that I have stuck with what I started with. )

Dylan Thomas' 'The Force that though the green fuse drives the flower'

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

I first encountered Thomas’s writing when I was in high school. Naturally, this discovery had nothing to do with school, I found the recording of Under Milkwood in the city record library. Richard Burton reading First Voice ! That opening!

I was captivated by the astonishing sound scape, and the humour of the script. From there I went to the short stories in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog, an obsession it took a decade to escape.

The poems I was never sure about. There were some that were immediately attractive, And Death shall have no Dominion, Do not go gentle into that good night, (both read on the Poetry Voice) but most of the poems baffled my desire for a prose sense.

Your response to Thomas’s poems is always going to reveal a lot about what you appreciate in a poem. If you like sound, they are magnificent. It’s very difficult not to read 'The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ without launching into an imitation of an ecstatic revivalist preacher pounding the pulpit. It took me several takes to escape from it.

If you are looking for prose sense you may be disappointed. If you’re looking for original ideas you will be looking in the wrong place.

The idea in the poem, all living things are linked, is hardly new. But that in no way detracts from the drive of the syntax. This poem is a good antidote to those who confuse poetry and philosophy. If you want rationally argued philosophy or theology stop being lazy and read the philosophers and the theologians.

And if you pay too much attention this poem also seems to be in two halves. The first two quatrains are magnificent, but then the force of the repeated ‘the force that’….is dissipated. If you think too long about the statements in the rest of the poem you might start to ask the wrong questions and undermine the rhetorical flourish. You might even wonder if Thomas, young as he was when he wrote this, found himself with eight magnificent lines and had no real idea what to do with them.

Or you might just sit back and go with the marvellous surge of the verse.

William Blake's 'London'.

A London Street in 1902. Poverty hadn’t changed much since Blake’s time

William Blake (1757-1827)

For some, Blake is the great visionary poet of the 18/19th century. He had to wait a long time until his reputation and position amongst some critics was established. He can still seem like a peripheral character who became lost in his own private mythology.

There’s an odd sense in some corners of poetry world that you have to like or admire certain poets. As much as I admire this particular poem, and it is undeniably a great poem and a fine work of social criticism, I am bored by the majority of Blake’s poetry, especially the longer works.

There was a time I thought this was a failure on my part and I would have apologised for it. Obviously the result of a lack of intelligence on my part, or a failure of critical acumen. But one of the great liberations in reading poetry comes when you realise that you don’t have to like anything.

Think music. There are fans of Wagner who don’t like Purcell, and fans of guitar based music who don’t like The Stones.

Think literature. There are educated people who see no greatness in James Joyce and readers who still think T.S.Eliot was a fraud.

Read widely, dismiss nothing at first encounter, listen to other people and their preferences, but don’t be deterred from the effort to find what love..

Liam Guilar's 'Byron In Venice: The poet in Exile.'

The Grand Canal in Venice

 Byron in Venice

(The poet in exile)

 The debris of a city in decline
slops at the crumbling steps,
as the sun sets over palaces 
even dusk can’t dignify.

 The clock strikes, he puts down the page
and calls for servants. Suddenly
cannot remember if he is to meet
the opera singer or the serving maid.

 No matter how elaborate the choreography,
his hands run free, his mind completes the rhyme.
Afterwards, duty done, excuses made, 
he’ll coax these stanzas to their climax 

 and scrawl defiance on the blank of time’s indifference,
graffiti on the walls of history. 
He has explored the tangled pathways of his heart
and written travelogues for those who stayed at home. 

If that leads here, to age and desolation;
the fading light, broken on the Grand Canal,
where life is repetition, and even lust grows stale;
the boys and women he has loved 

the friends he misses as he dines alone,
faded signatures on bundled letters,
locks of hair, old arguments the night returns;
if it leads here; beyond the poem, what remains? 

An aging face, once beautiful,  
staring through its own reflection,
soliciting an audience
to dignify the commonplace as art?

I wrote it after reading Byron’s letters. All twelve volumes. I was thinking about what it means to write, to live abroad, to use writing to organise memory. What happens when a commonplace experience or emotion is written about by a master like Byron? Is there any point to writing poetry?

The poem is taken from ‘From Rough Spun to Close Weave’. Signed copies are available from the shop at

www. Liamguilar.com Otherwise available at online book sellers.

R.S. Thomas' 'Mice'

R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)

R.S. Thomas outside his cottage

Over the course of a long life R.S.Thomas produced one of the most interesting bodies of work in the twentieth century. He wrote a lot, and most of what he wrote was short poems like this one, which work like a pebble dropped into the pond.

The speaker is listening to mice.

For a priest like Thomas, nagging away at his relationship to his God, how much doubt is healthy? At what point do the questions bring down the building?

Think of it another way.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, then the over examined life might well be unliveable. An informed, grounded skepticism might be healthy, but too much skepticism is simply destructive.

A bad poem would preach an answer. This one doesn’t.

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, carefully observed, rather than a convenient symbol for the poet’s musings. He’s right about Gulls’ eyes.

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 appears in the first branch. Seas of ink have been split over the translation of ‘Annwn’ or ‘Annwfn’. Though sometimes translated as Hell, it lacks the negative overtones of the Christian version, and in both irish and Welsh literature ‘the other world’ is not a bad place to visit. in the First Branch of the Mabinogion, after meeting Arawn, Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, is able to ride to Annwn where he spends a thoroughly enjoyable year feasting, hunting and carousing.

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 pun on choler, or anger. A board was a table, but also the altar. Free as the rode is free as the road and free as the rode (the Cross). ‘Still in suit’ puns on both Still and suit…And so on. He was Donne’s contemporary after all.

Of all Herbert’s poems why this one? For very non religious reasons. It reminds of those moments when study becomes onerous; progress isn’t progressing, time and effort seem wasted and the thought of doing anything that will give an immediate return, no matter how trivial, becomes so very attractive.

Having flung the grammars at the wall, and sworn to never open them again, sooner or later the voice is chiding…childe….calling you back to the necessities of discipline.

Herbert has been the subject of a fine biography: Music at Midnight by John Drury. Penguin published his complete English poems. Mark Oakley’s, ‘My Sour Sweet Days, George Herbert and the Journey fo the Soul’ is a gentle thoughtful non-academic introduction.

Sappho's 'Fragment 31'

Sappho (c600 BC)

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, translated by Josephine Balmer. Published by Bloodaxe books.

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 of English poetry through the ages and see how many you can find. As is often pointed out: ‘I love you’ may be the most beautiful thing you’ll ever say, or hear, but it’s not a poem.

Because of this, ‘Rapture’ is an outstanding collection, as the poems move from ‘Love’s first plague to her wintry fever’.

R.S.Thomas' 'Bravo'

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)

I first encountered R.S.Thomas’s work in a school poetry text book in about 1975. I’ve been reading his poetry, with admiration and enjoyment, ever since.

In the twentieth century’s three horse Thomas race, I’d back R.S over Dylan and Edward.

Over the course of a long writing life he produced a enormous number of high quality poems. ‘Collected Poems 1945-1990’ and ‘Collected Later poems 1988-2000’ combined run to over 800 pages. Most of the poems, like this one, take up less than a page.

Thomas himself was an interesting man. Photographs usually present him as a wild, wind swept celtic mage, the last of the Druids lowering at the camera or striding over the hills. He spent his working life as an Anglican priest working in small Welsh parishes. He learnt Welsh, wrote at least one autobiography in Welsh, but published his poems in English. Though probably a Welsh Nationalist, he was one of the twentieth century’s leading English language poets. There’s a fine, readable, award winning biography by Byron Rogers; ‘The man who went into the west’.

Many of the poems seem to be addressed to a God who if not absent, is not paying attention, and certainly not responding. The poems are characteristically short, with abrupt, line breaks which look almost arbitrary on the page. Read aloud they lose their jaggedness. Often turning on the precise use of a word, usually containing memorable lines and images, the apparently effortless way in which a speaker addresses the reader hides a considerable art.

Despite decades of rereading, It’s hard to choose an individual poem. I have the irrational sense that if you put the two collecteds together, you might have one of the longest, and most successful poetic sequences in twentieth century English poetry..

Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'Whoso List to Hunt'

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)

When does English Poetry begin?

You could argue Caedmon’s Hymn, the earliest datable poem in Old English. But listen to it on the Poetry Voice: Caedmon’s Hymn isn’t written in English.

You could argue for Chaucer, who is readable with patience by any literate modern English speaker.

Or you could go straight to Wyatt. Who is perhaps the first English poet to sound like a modern poet.

He has been the subject of two superb but very different, and therefore complimentary, biographies recently. And there is or was a fine Penguin collected, which may not do him a great service since wading through the lot will remind you of how utterly conventional so much of the poetry produced at the court was.

The fifteenth century is a dead one for English poetry. So you could argue that poetry that is recognisable to a modern reader, both in form and language, begins after Wyatt and Surrey found their models or excellence in Italy. Wyatt Englished Petrarch. You can see the process by comparing this poem with Petrach’s Sonnet 190 which Wyatt is ‘versioning’, it’s part translation, part adaptation, all new poem. You can compare translations: http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy/eng208PetrarchSonnet190.htm

But when you’ve got over the sense of an individual voice speaking directly to you and the striking images, you might want to consider the implications of the metaphor of the hunt as romantic pursuit. Think about what the hunters and their dogs do when they have finally trapped their prey. Welcome to the Renaissance.

Robert Graves' 'Ulysses'

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

There’s almost a sub genre of poems in English about Ulysses. They would make a fascinating anthology. and I’m steadily adding them to The Poetry Voice index. But in these poems Ulysses is usually heroic or admirable. Most often he’s someone to sympathise with. This poem is unsual in the way it treats its hero.

Graves fancied himself as a classicist. He also had an independent and often idiosyncratic view of the world.

W.B.Yeats' 'For Anne Gregory'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

A private joke made public? A painful truth? A cruel observation. A neat poem. One of the Intriguing aspects of Yeats’ output is that alongside the esoteric complications and the political and public poems, he could write, and publish something like this.

Basil Bunting's 'Now there's no hope of going back'

Basil Bunting (1900-1985)

This poem makes an interesting contrast with Louise MacNeice’s Thalassa. The poet may be an experienced sailor (Bunting was) and he may be talking to his boat, but there’s a sense of defeat here lacking in MacNeice’s poem.

The epigraph to this poem is ‘Perche no Spero’, because there is no hope, which I left out of the reading for no other reason than I forgot to read it.