Monthly Archive for February, 2010

Lines from the Laureate

Published on 24 February 2010 in Uncategorized. Closed

In 2009 Carol Ann Duffy was appointed Britain’s first woman Poet Laureate. Ever since her early collections, Standing Female Nude (1985), Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990), Mean Time (1993), all published by Anvil, her distinctive – funny and perceptive – poems have won prizes, pleased audiences and been studied on school syllabuses. Writing in The Observer, Charlotte Mendelson suggested that:

Part of Duffy’s talent – besides her ear for ordinary eloquence, her gorgeous, powerful, throwaway lines, her subtlety – is her ventriloquism. Like the best of her novelist peers … she slides in and out of her characters’ lives on a stream of possessions, aspirations, idioms and turns of phrase. However, she is also a time-traveller and a shape-shifter, gliding from Troy to Hollywood, galaxies to intestines, sloughed-off skin to department stores while other poets make heavy weather of one kiss, one kick, one letter … from verbal nuances to mind-expanding imaginative leaps, her words seem freshly plucked from the minds of non-poets – that is, she makes it look easy.

Her predecessor as Laureate, Andrew Motion, called her “a very, very bright, appealing, clever, ingenious, approachable and … heartwarming writer. She’s a Good Thing, capital G, capital T, one of the poets I most enjoy reading.”

This month we have had the pleasure of reading her Selected Poems (Penguin 2006) – a selection made by Carol Ann herself. The poems we will be looking at in the session include:

Standing Female Nude
Warming Her Pearls
In Mrs Tilscher’s Class
Originally
Translating the English
Mean Time
The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form Team
Away and See
Mrs Midas

Very much looking forward to seeing as many of you who can make it along to Blackwell’s on Tuesday 2nd March at 6.15.

Exhilarating and sad

Published on 2 February 2010 in Uncategorized. Closed

It was a small but focussed group that met last night to discuss Christopher Reid’s moving collection A Scattering (Arete Publications). Everyone welcomed the opportunity to read some poems from the book that’s been in the news for winning this year’s Costa Prize. We threaded our way from the Cretan labyrinth through the growth of a soul to the novel of one person’s life in poems that troubled, impressed and touched us. Here was the essence of life and death in elegantly crafted, highly imaginative poetry, displaying a wit similar to that of the metaphysical poets in the sixteenth century.

Christopher Reid achieves that difficult thing – making a poem look easy, as if it were a spontaneous utterance: Glib analogies!/ Makeshift Rhymes! But these are well-wrought poems, making full use of end rhyme and assonance, alliteration and apostrophe to achieve their effects. Two favourite poems catch intimate moments between husband and wife – one, when he is shaving her head after chemotherapy and revelling in its lineaments, the curve of her clean scalp – ‘Virgin landscape,/ so neat and so new!’ ; and then, as he waits in bed for her to return home one night, until the shock of the realisation: Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died. But the dream continues as she rolled and settled towards him before wisp(ing) clean away.

These are poems that are hard to read but you read compulsively for the sheer pleasure of their articulation, the searing knife edge they walk between distance and total immersion in the experience of grief. There is an almost scientific detachment that allows Christopher Reid to revisit memories of his long and happy marriage to a charming and remarkable woman and the space left in the wake of her passing; also an immense courage in admitting to his bereavement’s murky labours,/ quintessential upheavals, noxious bubblings/ at the bottom of a flask, as it strives to distil pure tears.

If you weren’t able to make it to this session, do pick up a copy of A Scattering when you can and read these astonishing and important poems. While you’re in the bookshop you can also buy Carol Ann Duffy’s Selected Poems, which is our selection for March. Tuesday 2nd in Blackwell’s at 6.15pm. Looking forward to seeing you then.