David Jones from 'The Fatigue'

David Jones (1895-1974)

Why me?

In this particular case, why is this soldier on duty at The Crucifixion and not that one?

More generally, why did some soldiers sign up for the first world war and find themselves in units sent into action on their first day at the front while others, signing up on the same day, found themselves transferred to garrison duties?

Why me? What impossible string of accidents and co-incidences caused me to be here at that particular place and time?

This extract from ‘The Fatigue’ answer that question. It begins a long way away in a guarded room. Anonymous decision makers make their decisions for reasons that are hidden, influenced by anything from bad wine, a broken heating system or a cold draft. It’s not personal. They didn’t choose you for a reason related to ‘who’ you are. But gradually the results of each decision pick up momentum. There’s an increase in the rhythm as the decisions move inexorably closer to their final unintended target.

It’s the best answer to ‘why me’ that I know.

A Note on Pronunciation

Jones’s writing is characterised by his use of non-English words. With the Anglo-Saxon and Welsh I’m reasonably sure how close i am with the pronunciation but with Latin I have no idea. Jones was at pains to point out that ‘inconspicious’ in this extract was not a misprint for inconspicuous.

‘The Fatigue’ was published in ‘The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments’ (Faber). I’ve used this version and read the last third or so of ‘The Fatigue’ . In the magnificent new edition of ‘The Grail Mass and other works’ (Bloomsbury Academic) what I have read is presented as a self contained section. In this version it ends

Partee-party, halt.
Party-stand fast men detailed-
re-mainder- steady!
Middle watch-to quarters-Dismiss

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.

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.

Liam Guilar's 'You never asked me for the Moon'

This is taken from Lady Godiva and Me.

My Leofric is not Tennyson’s. Nor is he, at this point of the sequence, the historical Earl anymore than Lady G is either the Historical Godgifu or the legendary Godiva.

Leofric is the one who stands and waits, hoping his lady will return. Hoping that being devoted in some way cuts him from the crowd, and knowing that it rarely does.

Lady Godiva and Me is a book length sequence of poems set in the city of Coventry, from its earliest Roman beginnings to the present day. More information and samples can be found at www.Liamguilar.com.

Sylvia Plath's 'The Applicant'

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

The reception and treatment of Plath’s poetry has been affected by the details of her life to an extent that is unusual.

But if you ignore the gravitational pull of the biography and the polemics, what you’re left with is a superb poet who produced some fine poems. Although he was talking about Robert Graves, Sir Geoffrey Hill’s suggestion that great art is produced when trauma and technique are in balance applies to Plath. in some other poems, and in some of her most famous poems, the technique is overwhelmed by the trauma. In others technique wins out and there’s nothing much left. When she got the balance right she produced impressive art.

I don’t know if this is one of her better poems, but it’s one I like for its surreal menace.

Robert Browning 'Porphyria's Lover'

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Reading aloud forces choices on the reader which are left unstated when the poem is read quietly. How does one read the last line of this poem? Is the speaker surprised, relieved disappointed? On the page they are all possible. Even the best reader has to choose. And for that reason I have been avoiding this poem for far too long.

Browning was the master of the dramatic monologue. And he perfected what we might loosely call ‘performative dissonance’. What is being said, is qualified or contradicted or undermined by the way it is being said. It’s an endemic characteristic in 19th Century fiction, from Gogol to Poe to Le Fanu to James.

It’s harder to achieve in a single monologue which has to create its own context. The effect is most famously achieved in ‘My Last Duchess’ where the message the speaker thinks he’s sending, and the one we receive, are so very different. He took it as far as it could go in “The Ring and the Book’ where the reader is presented with different versions of the same story.

In this case the effect is created much more simply, because what the speaker does and says are so far out of the normal definitions of sane behaviour. The problem is how to make him sound believable. If you are paying attention to the first half you can be forgiven for thinking you’re in familiar romance story territory. Then comes the swerve.

One of the familiar critical games to play with this poem is to try and gender the speaker from evidence within the poem. If you put aside the assumption the speaker is male, you will find no evidence within the poem to prove this. On the other hand, that’s also true for any number of first person poems. Browning exploits this common feature as part of the overall creepiness of the poem. (Creepiness is a very technical term…)

Liam Guilar's 'More than a broken token song'

I am a life long devotee of the ‘Traditional folk song’. This poem is dedicated, without irony, ‘For the Ballad singers, with gratitude and affection.’

But I don’t like Broken Token Songs, even if some of them have the best tunes.

In this particular sub set of the folk genre, a girl, we shall call her Sweet Dotty, is usually walking in her garden, or down by a river, when a stranger arrives and propositions her. She says she is waiting for Sweet William to return from the wars, or from sea, or wherever he’s been these last seven years, and she will be faithful to his memory. Having told the girl various lies, the stranger then reveals himself as the missing William. They produce their ‘broken tokens’ and live happily ever after.

The back story here is that before Sweet William went off to the war, set sail to make his fortune or was press ganged, he and Dotty broke a token, a ring or a coin, in two and each kept a half, so that when the battered and disfigured male returned he could prove who he was.

What I don’t like about broken token songs is the implication that it’s ok for the guy to have gone off and had all sorts of adventures but the girl must remain chaste and true. I know this goes back to the Odyssey and I know it’s cultural, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. So I wrote my own version.

If you don’t see the man in the door’s stories and language as utterly inappropriate, and see what that suggests about him, then I can’t help you. This poem is published in ‘Rough Spun To Close Weave’ by Ginninderra press. Available from all online sellers, details at www.liamguilar.com

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.

John Agard's 'Reporting from the front line of the great Dictionary Disaster'

John Agard (1949-)

My first encounter with John Agard’s poetry was his collection ‘Love Lines for a Goat-Born Lady’.

I don’t know if I’d read Grace Nichols first and then read John Agard because they were married or if it were the other way round and it really didn’t matter. They were both eye opening.

When 'Milk and Honey’ by Rupi Kaur recently went mega on the best seller lists, journalists tied themselves in knots trying to explain the book’s baffling popularity. It was direct. it was immediate, It was not ‘dusty’.

Made me wonder where the journalists had been for the past fifty years or so. Or what kind of poetry they were reading. They had certainly not been reading John Agard, or Grace Nichols, or a list that's too long to fill out.

You can be direct and immediate and intelligent. You can also be witty and make a political point without resorting to political slogans while you’re doing it. If you don’t believe me go read John Agard or Grace Nichols. My only regret here is that John Arlott is not reading this poem.

John Clare's 'I Am'

John Clare (1793-1864)

Clare is one of the contested figures in the ‘Romantic Movement’. He has the credentials, a farm labourer, his nature poetry was based on detailed observation of the world around him, he was mostly self educated and he ended his life in what was then called a lunatic asylum.

But his poetry sits awkwardly against his more well known and better connected peers. His ‘nature poetry’ reads like the product of man who had lived and worked in the landscapes he described. Attempts to claim he is central to the period sound like special pleading.

His biography is worth reading for an insight into the reality of poetry in the Romantic period.

W.B.Yeats' 'An Irish Airman foresees his death'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting proposition. If it’s one of your favourites, and you don’t like my reading, I apologise.

Paradoxically, the poem works so well because although it mentions specific places, you’d never know who the Irish Airman was or in which war he was fighting from the poem alone. It’s this delicate mix of the general and specific, combined with Yeats’ superb phrase making, that makes the poem so effective.

If you’re interested in technique you should compare this poem with its companion piece, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ written for the same Irish Airman.

Louise MacNeice's 'Thalassa

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

Peter McDonald printed this as as the last poem in his edition of MacNeice’s ‘Collected poems’. It has an attractive combination of elegy, defeat and determination.

Thalassa is the Greek word for the sea. For a classicist like MacNeice, it’s overloaded with connotations. From Xenaphon and his ragged army, desperately trying to get home, to the image of ageing Ulysses, pushing out on one more journey.

This is taken from McDonald’s beautiful ‘Collected poems’ Faber and Faber, 2007

Percy Shelley's 'England 1819'

Percy Shelley (1792-1822)

Change the date, or change country and date. Some things don’t change that much.

It was Shelley who claimed that Poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. If he really believed such mellifluous waffle he was delusional. He may have been outraged by the Peterloo Massacre, but sitting in his garden in Italy, writing this sonnet which wasn’t published til 1839 didn’t help the families of the poor or make any kind of change to Government policy.