Taliesin's 'Marwnat Owein'. The lament for Owain son of Urien Rheged.

A page from the Book of Taliesin showing the start of Marwnat Owain at the Large black capital.

Taliesin (6th Century)

There are at least two Taliesin’s. There was an Historical bard who composed poetry in the courts of ‘Welsh Princes’ in the Sixth Century, a contemporary of Aneirin. There was also a character from a folk tale, who gained knowledge and inspiration from a cauldron he was stirring, and after many transformations was born again as a miraculous child who could speak as soon as he was born and went on to be a magician and prophet as well as a poet.

The Book of Taliesin is one of those precious medieval manuscripts which are worth their weight in Guttenberg bibles. It dates from the 14th century, and the two figures have obviously merged. Brilliant scholars have spent their careers trying to untangle the poems, trying to date which may belong to the Historical Bard and which have been attributed to him. Most seem to think this one might be ‘authentic’.

It’s a marvellous controlled howl of a poem that belongs to a very different world. “King’ and ‘Prince’ dignify men who spent their lives raiding and being raided by their neighbours. Enthusiastic cattle thieves. It’s also a world where poetry served a very public function and the poet was an honoured member of the court.

Taliesin laments the dead Owein by celebrating highlights from his ruthless destruction of his enemies. The highest praise possible is to state that he was a generous, ferocious killer. The line ‘Medel galon geueilat’ could be translated almost literally as ‘A reaper of foes, a predator’.

This translation is taken from The Book of Taliesin, Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain, translated by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams. Penguin Classics 2020.

My pronunciation is not up to inflicting the original on an audience, but if you can, find a Welsh speaker reading the original.

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.

Susan Watson's 'Why she began to study the works of Sir Thomas Malory'.

Susan Watson

The Time of the Angels is a sequence of poems in which a young woman reads and re-reads Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur during the winter and spring of 1979. She is researching and writing an undergraduate dissertation, but her encounter with Malory is also a highly personal one; she perceives the centrality of ‘chances, choices, prophecies, destinies, past and future time’ and responds to an atmosphere of ‘loss soaking backwards through the pages like a tide receding’. And there is Malory’s voice: ‘a plain voice, threading beads’.

The Pamphlet is available by clicking here: Doing so will open a new window.

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.

Miroslav Holub's ''A History lesson'

Miroslav Holub, (1923 –1998)

Holub lived in Prague, and worked as an immunologist. He wrote a paper called ‘The Immunology of Nude Mice’. His obituary appeared in the New York Times.

He also wrote wonderful poems. His ‘Napoleon’ is also on the Poetry Voice, and as with that poem, versions of history collide, and the wit and the critical point will make themselves apparent if you let them.

This translation is taken from Heaney and Hughes’ ‘The Rattle Bag’ and the translation is by George Theiner.

Randall Jarrell's 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner'.

The Ball turret in a B-17 Bomber.

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

It’s one of the superficial oddities of English poetry that the First World War produced an enormous amount of poetry, some of which has entered the Canon, while the Second didn’t. It’s only a superficial oddity; culture and education had changed dramatically.

However, this short poem, by the American poet and critic, Randall Jarrell, is one of the most memorable poems written in the twentieth century about war. Part of the horror of the poem lies in the unemotional voice of the anonymous speaker. Apart from his position in the Ball Turret, he could be anyone.

The last line is difficult, not just because of the flat way it describes the aftermath of a young man’s death, but because of the way it’s written. It feels like it’s too long. Like the experience of hosing a body out of an aircraft.

As an example of an image being allowed to convey message, without the poet preaching, it’s very very good. If you want an anti-war poem, I’d choose this over something like Dulce Et Decorum est.

Incidentally, there’s several comments online about this poem ‘being about abortion’. It’s not. It’s about the death of a young man in the Ball Turret of a bomber.

Dafydd ap Gwilym's 'Love's affliction'. (Cystudd Cariad)

Dafydd ap Gwilym (?1320-?1350?)

 Dafydd ap Gwilym is not only one of the great poets of the Welsh Tradition, but of the  European Middle Ages.  If you haven’t heard his name before, you’ve missed out.

For a non-Welsh reader the attraction of Dafydd's poems in translation often lie in the persona he creates. He may be one of the great love poets of the Middle Ages, but his range marks him out. There’s desire to regret, with the usual amount of unrequited pining thrown in but the mix is seasoned with self-depreciation, humour, and an enjoyment of his own absurdity.

This particular poem is almost a cliché. The old poet looks back on his life and sees no future. It’s all over. ‘unless she beckons’. In which case everything he’s said should be immediately forgotten. 

It's one of those final lines that is awe inspiring in its 'correctness'. It closes the poem on a visual image that realigns everything that comes before it. It's as good as it gets.

 And as far as I can tell it's not what Dafydd wrote. 

On the University of Swansea Website, the last four lines of the translation read:

There rises in me (poetry's memory)
no joyful thought or passion,
nor any pleasant talk of them,
nor ever love, unless a girl asks for it. 

Rachel Bromwich translates the same lines as:

No joyful thought nor passionate desire
Arises in me-memory of song-
Nor is there any talk concerning them
No ever more of Love. Unless a girl should ask? 

Merchant and Feletra, whose translation I’m reading, point out the difficulty of transferring Dafydd's superb control of a fiendish poetic into English and hope 'If in our versions the poet seems uninhibited, eccentric, and outrageously ambitious, we have partly succeeded.'

Perhaps the best testimony to their success is that last line. To make the poem work as an English poem, they have made an imaginative leap from ‘ask’ to ‘beckon’ which as far as I can tell is not supported by the dictionary. It’s one of those fine moments of creative translation. 

  Unless She Beckons poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym. Translated by Merchant and Faltra. Redcoat books. 2018

Dafydd ap Gwilym. Poems Translated by Rachel Bromwich. Gomer Press 1982.

You can hear this poem read in its original Welsh at the superb University of Swansea site dedicated to Dafydd and his work.
Unfortunately it won’t let me link directly to the poem:
Click on this link…which will open a new window.

http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/eng/3win.php

Choose poem 82 from the drop down menu in the left hand corner, then click the ‘audio’ link at the bottom of the page.

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.

Luis Quintais' 'Amphitheatre' (trans Lesley Saunders)

Luis Quintais (1968-)

You can read about Luis Quintais, a poet writing in Portuguese as well as this translation and four other others by clicking on the link below. It will open in a new page..

https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/15/poems-by-luis-quintais-translated-from-the-portuguese-by-lesley-saunders/

This is a good example of what happens when one fine poet translates another. We live in a great age of translation. Which means we have access to poetry in languages you’ve probably never considered

Liam Guilar's 'After the Funerals'

The city of three spires….

After the funerals

This poem is taken from ‘Rough Spun to Close Weave’. I’ve been asked if I’d include the printed poem with the podcast.

After the Funerals

one by one they take their leave; parting
without formal courtesies 
startled by the shock, again, as 
one by one they take their leave.
Affection, understanding, even knowing 
what there was to value, come too late: 
gifts delivered past their use by dates.  

2

The plane strains upwards in the night, banks, and there, 
below the city that we thought we knew;   
drab streets, a park, its monuments, some houses
where the welcome meant we didn’t want to leave,
revealed as glowing labyrinth: vast, intricate and beautiful.
Too late we realise, again, how much there was to learn 
before the detail disappears, becomes a pool of light 
shrinking to a faint glow in the skies
behind us as we head towards another dawn.  

3

So one by one they leave 
stories that I didn’t understand and now forget,
lives whittled back to facts and dates 
no one contests or verifies.
Box brownie photos in an old shoebox?
Left trying, once again, to reconstruct a map 
I never stopped to memorise.  

Hafez 'What memories' (trans Dick Davis)

Hafez, 1315 (?) -1398/90)

We live in a great age of translation, and there's no excuse for not exploring poetries other than English. Hafez is one of the world’s great poets, in one of the history’s great literatures, and Dick Davis is one of the great translators.

Ironically i first came across both of them, a long time ago, in an essay Davis wrote called ‘On not Translating Hafez’.

This poem is taken from Davis’ ‘Faces of Love: Hafez and the poets of Shiraz’ Mage Publishers 2012/2019

from Prudentius' 'Hamartigenia'. On Free Will.

‘Prudentius’, Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. (348-405?)

Originally written in Latin, this poem was part of a contemporary theological argument. This sounds dour, but it rocks along in Martha M. Malamud’s translation.

The section I’ve read here is about free will. Prudentius argues that when God gave man power over the beasts, he also gave him power over himself. The first five or so lines I’ve read here present the point of view that Prudentius is arguing against. Therefore good and evil are choices we make. A man with no choice, who is forced to do good, cannot be good.

The first five or so lines I’ve read here present the point of view that Prudentius is arguing against.

Strikingly, for all the misogyny of the poem, when Prudentius comes to relate the genesis story of Adam and Eve, although he doesn’t name Eve, he doesn’t blame her either. Adam had a choice, and he made it. He choose to do what he knew was wrong. Therefore he, and no one else, was to blame for his actions.

Given the medieval habit of blaming Eve for ‘The Fall’ it’s a striking departure from the normal way the story is presented. Malamud claims that Milton would have known this poem, and and she points out, it’s fascinating to read the whole poem with Paradise Lost in mind.

This reading is taken from ‘The Origin of Sin, An English Translation of the Hamartigenia’, by Martha. A Malamud. (2011) lines 879-957.

Jeremy Hooker's 'Novelty'

Jeremy Hooker (born 1941)

I don’t often read two consecutive poems from the same poet, but I wanted to hear this one.

It’s also taken from Hookers’s ‘Selected Poems (1965-2018) published in 2020 by Shearsman books.

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.

Lewis Carroll's 'You are Old Father William'

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

Like many things in Alice in Wonderland, this was a parody, but the target has long been consigned to the footnotes. It is what it is: Carroll’s control of rhyme and rhythm seems effortless. It’s certainly enviable. And the poem is memorably funny.

I’m probably not the only one to remember hearing ‘I have answered three questions and that is enough’ or ‘be off and don’t give yourself airs’ quoted by an exasperated adult.

William Wordsworth's 'The world is too much with us'. (Any requests?)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’. Says it all really.

This reading was a request. Which reminds me to point out that if you have a poem you’d like to hear read on the Podcast you can send your request via the contact form on www.liamguilar.com or to my author page on facebook.

Some poems don’t work well read aloud, and some just don’t work when I read them. I can’t promise there will be no parrots, dogs or traffic in the background, but i’ll see what I can do.

On the website you’ll also find an index of all 159 poems that have been read so far.

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.