Great Regulars: "Conversation Piece", published at the end

of December 1977, is a serious business, too, despite its playfulness (that punning title, that parenthetic "are we direct?"). The subject is age of several kinds, as well as sex: the aged relatives; another age ("same game/ . . . different rules"); the timelessness of myth; old age in general. In the end, as if exhausted and resigned at last, the conventional abab rhyme scheme does its best to flatten out, into aaaa.

[by Gavin Ewart]

Conversation Piece

from The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: "Conversation Piece"

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[George Rostrevor] Hamilton, too, transfigures what he sees into pure contemplation so that landscape appears not as itself but as a quality of the imagination. The natural world is more alive in the mind than the eye, apprehended with "not of-this-world-only sense", its sunsets and sunrises transfigured into "one co-instancy of light".

Evening Prayer

from The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: "Evening Prayer"

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