Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 'The City of Yes and the City of No'.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017)

For my generation, perhaps the best known Russian Poet. Possibly better known than the more critically acclaimed Brodsky. Whether he was best known because he was marketable in ‘The West’ or because he was the best of his contemporaries in Russia is, for those of us who rely on translations, an unanswerable question. But sometimes, dealing with poetry in translation, you can be forgiven for wondering what’s being valued.

Not in the case of this poem. Even if it were English it would still work.

One strange evening I took a group from the high school where I worked to Brisbane (Australia) to hear Yevtushenko read. He was tall, elderly, wearing a puce suit and a huge, bright yellow tie. He had just published a novel call ‘Don’t die before your death’.

He didn’t so much read this poem as dance it down the aisle.

This is taken from Twentieth Century Russian Poetry. Silver and Steel, an anthology. Selected, with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, edited by Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward (with Daniel Weissbort) Doubleday 1993.

Andy Brown's 'Casket' from part V 'The High Barrow'

Andy Brown

264.59.1.jpg

This is taken from Brown’s sequence ‘Casket’ (Shearman 2019). The casket in question is the Franks Casket, an 8th century Whale bone box currently in the British Museum. What the picture below doesn’t do is show how small the thing is, or how intricate the carving.

The Anglo-Saxons were blessed with superb craftsmen. If you get the chance, go see the box in the British Museum, or some of the finds from the ‘Staffordshire Hoard’ and while you’re standing there remind yourself: no strong artificial light, no magnifying lens, no glasses.

Brown’s sequence consists of five parts, one for each side panel and one for the lid. Each part is broken into unnumbered sections, and the reading here is of parts one, four and five of the final section. The /I/ speaking at the beginning is the craftsmen, but his voice blurs into the voice of the box. The speaking object is a familiar device in Old English Poetry.

You can read more about ‘Casket’ here: http://www.liamguilar.com/enthusiasms/2019/6/17/casket-by-andy-brown

B.H.Fairchild's 'Keats'

B. H. Fairchild (1942-)

I know nothing about B. H. Fairchild except that he’s an American, and I own a copy of his ‘Blue Buick: new and selected poems’.

I admire the man’s art. The poems are deceptively conversational, like this one celebrating Keats as craftsman The poet as maker, working at his art like a man at a lathe, wrapped up in the pleasure of making.

If you’re hurrying, you’ll miss the unobtrusive skill that went into the poem.

This is taken from ‘The Blue Buick’ Norton, 2016

Zbigniew Herbert's 'The Envoy of Mr. Cogito'.

It’s hard to assess poems by a poet who writes in a language that isn’t your own. It’s easy to miss the poetry and be seduced by the content or the attitude. But Herbert is arguably one of the great poets of the twentieth century and by the time he died he was revered in his own country.

 This is taken from The Collected Poems, 1956-1998, translated by Alissa Valles and published by Atlantic books. It is probably essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth century European poetry.

 I’m apologetic about the way I pronounce his first name, but more of his poems will inevitably appear in later podcasts. Meeting Mr. Cogito is good for you.    

Louis MacNeice 'Cradle song for Eleanor'

This is one of the first poems I memorised, a very long time ago. Louise MacNeice is often overlooked or undervalued in histories of English poetry where he is overshadowed by his friend W. H. Auden. But he was one of the great lyric poets writing in English in the twentieth century. To mark the centenary of his birth in 2007 Peter McDonald edited a beautiful collected for Faber. McDonald also contributed an excellent discussion of Cradle song to 'Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his legacy' essays edited by Fran Brearton and Edna Longley (Carcanet 2012). (An essay is excellent when it makes you revist a poem you’ve known for forty years and see things you hadn’t previously noticed…)

Robert Service's 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew'.

This is from ‘Songs of a Sourdough’. Robert Service made his name writing poems about the Yukon Goldrush in the 1890s. ‘The shooting of Dan McGrew’ is best heard around a campfiire, or in a mini bus stuck in a snow storm. Best recited from memory.

Service was once very popular, especially with people who ‘didn’t like poetry’: these days he may be almost forgotten.

Evan Boland's 'Quarantine'

This poem is from the title sequence of Boland’s 2001 collection ‘Against Love Poetry’. Her book makes a case for a poetry that deals with human relationships as they are, rather than the kind of ‘love’ that poetry so often seems concerned with. ‘Quarantine’ flatly relates an incident. But it’s one that’s difficult to forget.