that I found a few years ago I had it by heart without ever having consciously learned it ...Tamer and Hawk by Thom Gunn
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: theblogblooks: Poem of the day: After war yesterday, today another love poem.
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I'm not so keen on the first stanza and final line, which feel to me slightly superfluous, but [Tobias] Hill's portrait of the intimate glimpses afforded from the train is one I cherish. I highly recommend the whole collection, in fact - there's a fantastic 12-poem sequence that charts the city's changing face over a year. Great stuff.
To a Boy on the Underground
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: theblogblooks: Poem of the day: Another week, another poem of the day . . . this time on summer in the city.
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And I love the unashamedly demonstrative tribute of the final section's abbreviated heroic couplets.
What a poem. I should warn you that I am now sitting at my computer, spoiling for a fight with anyone who presumes to disagree!
In Memory of WB Yeats by WH Auden
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: theblogblooks: Poem of the day: The best thing Auden ever wrote (in my very humble opinion . . .)
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[Yeats] didn't publish the poem at the time he wrote it for fear of upsetting Lady Gregory, and one can see why.
Separately, these poems are superb; read together, they're devastating. And in terms of war poetry, they blow Owen, Sassoon et al out of the water.
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: theblogblooks: Poem of the day: Finally, some Yeats.
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So, in honour of my experience, and with apologies for the crashing solipsism, I give you a poem by the wonderful Anne Stevenson, a sometime resident of the north-east, whose lines on the Tyne and its bridges always come into my mind whenever I cross the river on the train to - or from - home.
On the 17.14 out of Newcastle by Anne Stevenson
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: theblogblooks: Poem of the day: Today, something from Anne Stevenson.
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His poems are all heavily copyrighted, so here's the marvellous opening, and a link to read the rest of it somewhere more official.
In Country Sleep by Dylan Thomas
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: theblogblooks: Poem of the day: What a day--time for some Thomas.
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But what seems deadening in a single poem becomes beguiling as the poems accumulate. By limiting herself to fundamental nouns--knives, pails, snow, hearts, ice--[Sasha] Dugdale creates a spare, mythical tone that fits itself perfectly to the elemental Russian landscape in which much of her collection is set.
from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Staying still
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