If you want to focus your reading for May 13th’s session on Ruth Padel’s The Soho Leopard, the poems we will be concentrating on are:
Tigers Drinking at Forest Pool
The Burmese Nat of Shape-Changing and Betel-Nut Sends a Dream to the Corrupt Official Who Ordered the Beheading of his Secret Beloved
Takeaways
Head Slap and Water Dance
The Wishing Stone
The Forest, the Corrupt Official and a Bowl of Penis Soup
Sighting the Tiger
Look forward to seeing you there – and discussing this fascinating collection.
Thank you to everyone for a lively discussion of Sharon Olds’s Selected Poems last night. It was great to see people from last week and new faces as well.
We began with a brief biography of Olds to set her into context. She is a rare creature: a poet who enjoys popular as well as critical acclaim. Olds comments on the importance of her readers:
The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents – all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers. The concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart.
We set out to discuss the following seven poems which span Olds’s poetic career:
I Go Back To May 1937
The Language of the Brag
The Ferryer
The Promise
The Race
Psalm
The Unswept
We managed to get through the first four (one up on last week!). Issues raised included the ambiguity and contradiction of meaning in Olds’s work – something we kept returning to throughout the session. In discussion, poems that appeared an ‘easy read’ proved complex, layered and resistant to analysis. People admired the bravery and the risk of Olds’s writing. The felt honesty of this inspired immense sympathy and empathy. However it was also felt that reading Olds could be an unsettling experience and make a reader uneasy.
For Olds fans there are three new poems in the current issue of Poetry Review and an interview with the poet. See www.poetrysociety.org.uk.
In our next session on Thursday 3 May, Linda will be hosting a discussion on Ruth Padel’s book The Soho Leopard. This event will precede a reading by Ruth Padel who will also be giving this year’s Bloodaxe Lectures: both sets of events will take place at the end of May. For more information see here.
Finally, do please register for the Poetry Room – if you haven’t already – by clicking on to the button on this site. Doing so will get you a nifty membership card and discounts on all the books under discussion at Blackwell.
