Tag: comfort

hallowe’en

Well, if Strictly can have a Hallowe’en special, why can’t this column? I do like Annie Finch’s take on the Celtic Feast of the Dead, ‘Samhain‘. I don’t know that I understand it all intellectually but, as ever with me, that matters less than the feeling with which it leaves me. There’s a shiver, not of fear but something more like awe, of apprehending the vastness of time and our place in a continuum. See how the poem leaves you.

Read More

the wheel of fortune

I just love it when a poem from another time or place “reaches” me: suddenly I’m in relationship with someone from another age or culture, often someone whose bones are long since turned to dust. Ain’t that something? Last week a poetry magazine I read had Robert Southall’s* ‘Times go by Turns‘ printed under the Editorial, and I had just that experience of remote connection: I felt less alone—comforted by being accompanied, by seeing what is common and constant in human experience. See if the poem does it for you, too.

Read More

the unbroken

A couple of years ago the 42 group began a December tradition of making a poetry advent calendar. We choose a topic and each contribute a few of our favourite poems which, with a great deal of sherry and swearing, I grapple into a vaguely consistent format, allotting a poem to each day of advent and emailing out the resulting document. This year our topic has been healing/reassurance/comfort, that sort of thing. The Christmas Eve poem a group member contributed was new to me—so beautiful and so apt for these strange times that, with apologies to group members who are seeing the same poem twice in one day, I share it here too. Delight in ‘The Unbroken‘ by Rashani.

Read More

strangeness making sense

The other poem in my head while I was on holiday was one I almost always hear in there when I’m away from home: Larkin’s ‘The Importance of Elsewhere‘. The experience of being where no-one knows your name (apologies for the echo of the Cheers theme tune which may have just drifted across your mind) can feel safe or frightening, liberating or paralysing, and I’ve always loved Larkin’s exploration of these facts in this poem.

Read More

an unlikely trio

It’s very often time for Mary Oliver, I find, though I know those who do not agree. For those readers, best pass by. Today I wanted to read ‘Wild Geese‘, so I am. I know most people have already read it. I know that (like other Oliver texts) it’s been plundered for Pinterest posts and self-help-seminar titles and many, many Inspirational Items (posters, mugs, t-shirts, who knows what). Still, its beauty and wisdom persist—just as the Mona Lisa survives being a jigsaw. So: enjoy ‘Wild Geese’ all over again (with the plus of hearing Oliver read it).

Read More
error: Content is protected !!