Great Regulars: According to those in the know (and, trust me

on this, no one knows more about these things than the Literary Editor of The Telegraph, Sam Leith), Britain is set to get its first female Poet Laureate with the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy to the historic post.

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: And, Britain's Newest Poet Laureate is . . .

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American Poet Laureate (1973-1974) Daniel Hoffman: The seeming simplicity of Frank Wilson's "Still Point" repays a close reading. Ten musical lines evoke, "As everything spun round/About the silence that he found/He had become," a man unable to "keep in touch" with others. The distracting grandeur of the natural world is economically embodied in two modest images, "a drooping bough,/A flitting bird." These, casually enlisting his notice, stir him to feel "alive awhile."

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: In celebration of planetary poetry month 14

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"Tusking," published in March 1986, was the first of his poems to appear in the TLS: a powerful frightening parable of coloniser and colonised, it is untypical of Imlah's work only in its short lines. Everything else: the distinctive voice, a mixture of forthrightness and delicacy, the clear echoes of pre-twentieth-century verse (Browning, ballads, nursery rhymes), the vivid economical evocation of place and action, the delight in sly subversion of conventional views and images--in this case, of Englishness--is to be found throughout [Mick] Imlah's later work and is here combined with unforgettable freshness and verve.

Tusking

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: In celebration of planetary poetry month 20

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The speaker of this poem is at once defeatist and fainthearted (yet still a romantic). On top of all it all, she seems a little exasperated with herself, with her inability to fully interact with her world, but resigned to that, resigned to the world--or certain parts of it--always being too much to take at once. In the end, in what seems almost a parody of courtly love, the speaker's romantic side must remain hidden, for her eyes only, hidden from her sweetheart the drunk, but happily, through the art of poetry, not from us.

[by Meaghan Strimas]

Nod to the Drunkard I Once
Sat Next to in the Park

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: In celebration of planetary poetry month 21

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A theme throughout Paul [Vermeersch]'s work is empathy for the animal world that never loses its human subjectivity, one that is committed to seeing the unique "otherness" of the wild rather than only its anthropomorphised translation. This selection is from a three-part poem for Koko, the most famous resident of The Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, California; it demonstrates his unique ability to speak simultaneously to the specific while pointing a finger at a world hidden beneath it.

Ape (part one)

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: In celebration of planetary poetry month 22

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And so one has the experience of entering and leaving--a forest, a day, a life--knowing that all will turn back on itself in fulfillment, precisely the sort of immortality that will dwarf the giant redwoods and make their rings seem to spread like ripples on a pond. (One final note: Read this poem and you will know what the real California feels like.)

[by John Timpane]

Big Basin

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: In celebration of planetary poetry month 23

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In "Show Your Work!," an incisive essay he penned for The Poetry Foundation Online (which garnered an overwhelming response from readers in its comments' section stretching into next week), Matthew Zapruder explained the way in which the Velvet Underground lead him to conclude American poetry's in the poorhouse because its critics fail to do the job implicit in that description of same:

Today, in American poetry, very few critics take it upon themselves to examine the choices poets make in poems, and what effect those choices might have upon a reader. As a consequence, very few people love contemporary American poetry. Many more might, if critics attempted to truly engage with the materials of poetry--words and how they work--and to connect poetry with an audience based on an engagement with these materials.

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Matthew Zapruder takes contemporary critics to task

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