Month: January 2020

poetry appreciation
poetry appreciation

yes, please

Jan 23, 2020 #grief, #kind, #kindness, #Larkin, #learning, #Naomi Shihab Nye, #Nye, #Philip Larkin, #poem, #poems, #poetry, #sadness, #sorrow, #Talking in Bed, #wisdom by Lucy Crispin

Something to move and comfort us today, a poem nourishing and everyday-special as homemade soup. Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Kindness’ actually mentions soup, but her poem is not the ‘weakened broth’ to which it refers. No, this is a complete meal. It’s tender and wise and lives up to its name. You can read it here or hear the poet read it here.

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poetry appreciation

westward, look…

Jan 16, 2020 #Arthur Hugh Clough, #Clough, #despair, #doubt, #faith, #hope, #poem, #poetry, #Say not the struggle nought availeth, #Victorian by Lucy Crispin

I left you last week with the promise of handrails and lifelines. Ta-daa! Here they are: ‘Say not the struggle nought availeth’, another poem straight out of the C19th’s death-throes-of-faith anguish which has, however, long performed the handrail/lifeline functions for me. You can read the poem here and or last week’s reader can read it for you here. Alternatively, Derek Jacobi reads it here; I much prefer his reading but could do without the music. The poem is there to create the mood all by its little self, after all. However… See what you think.

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poetry appreciation

handrails and lifelines and emergency lanterns

Jan 9, 2020 #Arnold, #despair, #doubt, #Dover Beach, #faith, #fear, #hope, #Matthew Arnold, #melancholy, #poem, #poetry, #sadness, #The Buried Life, #trust by Lucy Crispin

In an article in The Times in 2016 Libby Purves wrote of how ‘[p]eople have been through everything before us and some, by great grace, have recorded it with undying power. English-speakers are particularly lucky,’ she continued, ‘since some of the very best have done this in our fabulously hybrid, magpie language… [Poets] have crafted handrails and lifelines and emergency lanterns. They reassure us that others walked this hard trail and lived to express it’.

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poetry appreciation

‘there’s nothing either good or bad,

Jan 2, 2020 #fellowship, #hope, #hopes, #intentions, #Jackie Kay, #Matt Goodfellow, #New Year, #Ogden Nash, #poem, #poems, #poetry, #potential, #promise by Lucy Crispin

but thinking makes it so’. A trio of poems which see the coming of the new year from very different places. First, we have Ogden Nash’s ‘Good riddance, but now what‘, which finds the poet in characteristically wry mood. The apparent cosiness of the opening invitation—’Come children, gather round my knee’—is soon dispelled with the imagery of something ‘about to burst/… like a time bomb in the hall’. It brings to mind Dorothy Parker’s notorious way of greeting visitors or answering the phone: ‘What fresh hell is this?’. I love the fact that here Nash has the clock ‘crouching, dark and small’—small, as a bomb is, in relation to the size of the destruction it can wreak. Assume brace position. Be ready to duck. I can certainly recognise in myself a mood where I look at the future with that sort of attitude.

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