Here again – for the summer solstice – are those Wittenham Clumps. By the early 1940s Nash’s was in declining health. Suffering from chronic asthma – triggered his wife Margaret believed by inhaling gas at Passchendaele in 1917 – he had endured several spells in hospital. He and Margaret, began to make visits to nearby Boars Hill where their friend Hilda Harrison lived…
Forget the mother of all bombs and the father of all mankind – here is the ultimate parent of all apologies. Just look at this great list as the poet slyly moves from the serious to the playful, from the abstract to the mundane, from the burden to the lightweight. It’s an insistence on going on living and enjoying small…
“My boy you should go in for nature.” Sir William Richmond’s advice to Paul Nash on reviewing some of his early drawings. One of Paul Nash’s friends at the Slade School of Art was Claughton Pellew-Harvey who “had a deep love for the country, particularly for certain of its features, such as ricks and stooks of corn.” At first I…
Poltroon – the very word is like a … what? a.) A North American mammal of the raccoon family known for its habit of rooting for grubs in the undergrowth of deciduous forests b.) A metal or earthenware pot typically having a funnel-shaped top, often kept under the bed c.) An abject or contemptible coward, lacking courage; ignobly timid and faint-hearted. The Poltroon…
The Dancers All day beneath the hurtling shells Before my burning eyes Hover the dainty demoiselles — The peacock dragon-flies. Unceasingly they dart and glance Above the stagnant stream — And I am fighting here in France As in a senseless dream. A dream of shattering black shells That hurtle overhead, And dainty dancing demoiselles Above the dreamless dead. …
How to Read a Poem: Beginner’s Manual First, forget everything you have learned, that poetry is difficult, that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you, with your high school equivalency diploma and steel-tipped boots, or your white collar misunderstandings. Do not assume meanings hidden from you: the best poems mean what they say and say it. To read…
The End and the Beginning After every war someone has to clean up. Things won’t straighten themselves up, after all. Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass. Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags. Someone has to drag…
A bike ride in the country. A conversation interrupted by a near accident and the shock of a racist chance encounter. The ride resumes only to be interrupted again by a moment of menace. And then something quite unexpected happens.. I love the way the poet just drops us into the middle of what seems like an ongoing conversation. As if…
Blackbirds are notorious for being able to mimic the sounds they hear as they hop about the celestial chimney pots of suburbia. Ice cream van jingles, phone ring tones, car alarms and ambulance sirens – they can do the lot. John Drinkwater – born in Leytonstone, London – writes about the song of the blackbird in Loyalties – the anthology…
Two Lorries It’s raining on black coal and warm wet ashes. There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew’s old lorry Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman With his Belfast accent’s sweet-talking my mother. Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt? But it’s raining and he still has half the load To deliver farther on. This…
Sleeping is one of the things cats do best. Which is lucky because it limits the number of minutes and hours in the day that the cat plugs into the socket and goes on a wired rampage of electric energy. Sleeping one of their better qualities and most advanced skills. Cats, it seems, do not suffer from insomnia and are capable…
An aubade is a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn or early morning. By the 1930’s it was clear that the war that was supposed to end all wars was not going to. MacNeice wrote this in 1934 and it well expresses a sense of impending doom. Not the dawn of a bright new era of hope and fresh…
Moonlight What time the meanest brick and stone Take on a beauty not their own, And past the flaw of builded wood Shines the intention whole and good, And all the little homes of man Rise to a dimmer, nobler span; When colour’s absence gives escape To the deeper spirit of the shape,– Then earth’s great architecture swells Among her…
Abandoned Farmhouse He was a big man, says the size of his shoes on a pile of broken dishes by the house; a tall man too, says the length of the bed in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, says the Bible with a broken back on the floor below the window, dusty with sun; but not a…
Britain declared war on Germany just after U.A. Fanthorpe’s birthday in 1939. She was ten. Living in Kent she was familiar with the signs and sounds, fears and deprivations of wartime England. She knows the enemy – whom she calls by the popular put-down, the Hun – by “the nightly whines, searchlights, thuds, bomb-sites”. Her French teacher is distressed and distracted…