Best poetry

Hughes's poems of middle age are his real masterpieces – especially the farm poems from Moor-town, the lovely poems of fancy that he collected in Season Songs and the oblique reminiscences of his Yorkshire childhood in Remains of Elmet. The fortunes of this last book have been harmed by its look-ing so pretty, with its large pages and the

l i t e r a r y l i v e s

memorable photographs by Fay Godwin, but it must be one of the best volumes of verse of the second half of the century, up there with Larkin's High Windows and Heaney's Field Work.

Church Going" by Philip Larkin

"Church Going" by Philip Larkin



Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come"
"To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

"A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,


Excerpt From: Larkin, Philip. "Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis." Faber & Faber, 2012-04-05T00:00:00+00:00. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Excerpt From: Larkin, Philip. "Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis."

Excerpt From: Larkin, Philip. "Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis." Faber & Faber, 2012-04-05T00:00:00+00:00. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Sent from my iPad

Notes from “If: A Treasury of Poems for Almost Every Possibility” by Allie Esiri & Rachel Kelly

8 June 2015

The Leader by Roger McGough

The Leader

ROGER MCGOUGH
1937–

I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee, I'm the leader
I'm the leader
 
OK what shall we do?

All Excerpts From

Allie Esiri & Rachel Kelly. "If: A Treasury of Poems for Almost Every Possibility." Canongate Books, 2012-10-03T23:00:00+00:00. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Sent from my iPad

The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate7
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
5 The tangled bine-stems8 scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
10 The Century's corpse outleant,9
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
15 And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
20 Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
25 So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
30 His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
December 31, 1900 1902
7. Gate leading to a small wood. 9. Leaning out

September 2014 by Carol Ann Duffy

Tha gaol agam ort.*

A thistle can draw blood,

so can a rose,

growing together

where the river flows, shared currency,

across a border it can never know;

where, somewhen, Rabbie Burns might swim,

or pilgrim Keats come walking

out of love for him.

Aye, here's to you,

cousins, sisters, brothers,

in your brave, bold, brilliant land:

the thistle jags our hearts,

take these roses

from our bloodied hands.

*I love you

Sent from my iPad

Text from "Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis"

"Poetry of Departures

 
 
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.
 
And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said
 
He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,
 
Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.
 "
from 'Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis' by Philip Larkin

Sent via Marvin

Sent from my iPad

A Visit, TLS 14 Jan 2014

A Visit

I went to see him. He was old then
And laughed at what he forgot and found
As if out of thin air, his mind elsewhere.
The ground floor flat not anywhere
He'd call home but where he lived happily enough.
It had never been the plan. And yet to me
The books, the tall window and the view,
The few paintings, landscapes by his wife,
And by his daughter, his eagerness for me
To listen with him for more than an hour
To Shostakovich's '24 Preludes & Fugues'
Seemed an idyll of an enviable kind, a script
I'd write for myself for when things fall apart
Piecemeal like that late autumn afternoon.
He'd showed me what he'd kept, letters from
Great poets he'd known, old photographs
Of himself and X, and Y, some manuscripts
That had come his way, his own books
And those by others in his long-gone world.
The rest he said was archived somewhere,
Which seemed to cut him short, until suddenly:
'Dying is for the living,' he exclaimed, keenly,
Something he liked to say, 'There's no future
In posterity.' I'd heard the same before, and
'Never look to be wise. Speak your mind.
Wisdom is for fools.' And then he rose
That we should neither outstay his welcome.
A bloom of wine hung in my lungs long after
I got home and his talk of Cold War days
Ran on like a newsreel in my head until
That flicker and flap as the spool reaches its end
And I sat on a moment in the dark, moved
By a sudden understanding of my life.

ANDREW McNEILLIE