The Poetry Voice

In the Book of Genesis, Abraham (Abram) is tempted by God, who tells him to sacrifice his only son. Obediently Abraham takes Isaac, and is prepared to kill him, but God interrupts and offers him an animal to sacrifice instead. One wonders about the conversation between father and son on the way home. Owen's poem revises the well-known story. The old man refuses to sacrifice the Ram of Pride and goes on with the slaughter. As statement the poem's effective, as a poem it's heavy handed. The archaic diction and syntax evokes the memory of the prose of the King James Bible; but the ‘belts and straps' and ‘parapets and trenches' seem an unnecessary attempt to force the link between the Biblical sacrifice to the trenches and parapets of the first world war, manned by young men with belts and straps. At the risk of being heretical, I think Leonard Cohen's lyric to the song ‘The story of Isaac' makes the point more powerfully, and more effectively.

John Dressel (b1934) I worry about my pronunciation of people's names, so if I have mispronounced John Dressel's I apologise. Like Hamlet, (who appeared in the previous post) Goliath has escaped the facts of his story. Recently a news headline read; ‘Firm wins in David and Goliath legal battle'. The writer of the headline was confident that the reader would know that this meant a battle between a small firm and a much bigger one. The writer was also positioning the reader to see the smaller as heroic and admirable, and the bigger as the bad guy in the case. The story of David and Goliath has entered into popular discourse, and people who have never read the Bible know enough to make sense of that headline. But there's no reason why we should automatically sympathise with David, or with every small entity taking on a larger one. Dressel's poem makes this point, playfully. This poem is taken from 'Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry', edited by Dannie Abse and printed by Seren/Poetry Wales Press 1997, reprinted 1998.

Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016) This is the first of a short run of poems in which poets use other works of literature or characters from literature to make a point or to consider an idea. Hamlet is one of the most famous characters in the western tradition, so much so that he has escaped his play and lives a life of his own. People who have never seen a version of the play or read it have heard of him. ‘To be or not to be' entered everyday speech so long ago it may be used without any knowledge of what the rest of the speech contains. It's a young man struggling to verbalise a reason for either living or dying. Anyone can be driven to ask ‘what is the point' or ‘what is the meaning of life'. You don't need to be haunted by what may be the revengeful ghost of your father, or suspect your mother of adultery with your regicidal, fratricidal uncle. Once the religious and philosophical answers have been rejected, the purpose of life becomes finding a a purpose that will make life seem desirable. As Thomas says in this poem, it doesn't have to be a desire to win an olympic medal or climb mount Everest. Growing onions will do it. Only when you have a reason to live, that matters to you, will you fear death, and only having feared death will you have lived. I found this poem quoted at the end of Tony Conran's introduction to ‘Welsh Verse; Translations by Tony Conran.' Poetry Wales Press 1986. I knew of Gwyn Thomas as a translator of The Mabinogion and his reputation as a poet. I know very little about this poem except I assume it's translated by Tony Conran from Welsh. If anyone knows differently please let me know.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) I have been rereading Yeats. I recommend everyone with an interest in English poetry should do. It's difficult to think of a collected poems which has so many great poems in it, or where the quality improves chronologically. This poem sits at the end of his ‘Last Poems'. It's not a great poem by his standards, but the honesty of it is appealing. Old men are just young men in failing bodies and Yeats was acutely aware of this. The last two lines express an impossible wish but also acknowledge and accept what has passed. If you wanted to, you could ask yourself which is the more human response: the men obsessed with politics, or the man admiring the girl. You could also ask yourself which one of the two is less likely to start a war.

This poem is an extract from 'Talking to Cameras', the first part of the sequence ‘Texts for a Film'. I laughed the first time I read it. As he explains, a Birmingham screwdriver is a hammer, I grew up in Coventry, about 20 miles away, and ent to university in Birmingham. I've often heard the phrase. It's one of those faintly humorous regional insults that abound in the UK, suggesting something about the craftsmanship and craftsmen from Birmingham. But Fisher takes what is an insult and turns it into a mediation on a way of thinking. It's the shift, and the humour, that distinguishes this poem. The poem is taken from ‘The Long and Short of it, poems 1955-2010 (new edition 2012) Bloodaxwe books.

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential. At some point in his career Yeats had wanted to be a national poet, writing for and on behalf of his country. But in this poem he renounces that ambition, having, he says, discovered that the people he thought we was writing for and about are not worthy. He renounces them for an imaginary figure, a solitary fisherman. And in the poem's most memorable image, Yeats hopes that before he's old, he will have written him one poem ‘as cold/and passionate as the dawn'. You can spend some time admiring those two adjectives, and the effect they create. Hugh Kenner suggested the difference between Yeats and Pound, or Yeats and most poets, was that Pound, once he'd left London, could sit in relative isolation at his typewriter in Rapallo telling himself he was a genius and dismissing any rumours of negative response to his work as the sniping of lesser interigences. Yeats, standing in the wings at the abbey theatre was forced to confront an often baffled, sometimes hostile audience. It might be one of the reasons Yeats' poems improved as he got older.

The second of these two poems was written in response to the first. A.E.Houseman (1859-1936) was one of the leading classical scholars of his day. Today he's remembered as the author of ‘The Shropshire Lad' , one of the most well known collections of poems from the first quarter of the last century. I suspect his mercenary army owes a lot to Xenophon's classic account of how ten thousand Greek soldiers marched to the sea after their Persian paymaster was killed in battle. Hugh MacDairmid (1892-1978), one of the significant Scottish poets of the twentieth century, had a less romantic view of mercenaries. which i suspect might be shared by those unlucky enough to have encountered them.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Technically this isn't a poem, but an extract from Beckett's novel 'Watt' where it's set out as continuous prose. But it's too much fun to read to leave out on the grounds that it's not ‘a poem'. If you want to tie your head in knots you can try to define ‘poetry' and ‘poem'. Whatever your definition there will always be a liminal case that challenges the definition. Beckett's prose is also often a lot funnier than the stern photos of Beckett would lead you to expect. So go along for the ride. And enjoy.

Rudyard Kipling: 1865-1936 This isn't one of Kipling's best poems. But it reveals a side of him most people ignore. The incident described here is probably apocryphal. The scorn in the last line depends on a play on the meanings of the word charge. It's too vicious and carries too much contempt to call it a pun. The Charge of the Light Brigade occurred during the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. In what is sometimes remembered as one of history's great military blunders, or stupidities, approximately 670 British lightly armed cavalry charged straight down a valley at Russian Cannons with Russian batteries firing at them from either side. There is no record of any of the troopers saying, this is a really stupid idea…Surprisingly, there were some survivors. It would probably have been quietly forgotten to every one but military historians of disaster, a classic case of bad communication, if Alfred Lord Tennyson hadn't written ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade' within weeks of the event. The popularity of the poem, taught in British schools for the best part of a century, can be measured by the way phrases from it entered into popular discourse. ‘Someone had blundered' ‘there's not to reason why/there's but to do and die' even if the quotations were often incorrect. As part of the education of British children, the poem with its insistence on the courage, glory and honour of the participants, contributed not just to to the mentality that lead to equally disastrous military stupidities in the First World War, but the the enthusiasm for the military that contributed to so many eagerly signing up for that war. Kipling's poem, written almost forty years after Tennyson's is an indirect critique both of Tennyson's poem and the British Public's attitude towards its military, which he criticises in other poems, most simply in ‘Tommy'.

This is taken from A Man of Heart, published by Shearsman press (2023) Maxim 1 History is a record of brutality tempered by outbursts of idealism. Memory There was never enough light. Even in summer, shade and shadows contour brightness. At night, torches and lamps shiver the edge of sight. The candle drew attention to itself while life continued in the silent, darker ebb and pool beyond. I remember her hand on the pillar, a shadow on the white stone. Her eyes bright in a dark face. She was worried, there were visitors, men of power and influence, come to court her daughter. Not bad for a freed slave from the lands around Carthage. I remember her hand on the pillar, the light shaking over the mosaic floor. She had plans. We all had plans.

If you'd like to see the Middle English version I based this on:Reowen sæt a cneowe; & cleopede to þan kinge. & þus ærest sæide; in Ænglene londe. Lauerd king wæs hæil; For þine kime ich æm uæin. Þe king þis ihærde; & nuste what heo seide. þe king Vortigerne; fræinede his cnihtes sone. what weoren þat speche; þe þat maide spilede. Þa andswarede Keredic; a cniht swiðe sellic. he wes þe bezste latimer; þat ær com her. Lust me nu lauerd king; & ich þe wulle cuðen. whæt seið Rouwenne; fæirest wimmonnen. Hit beoð tiðende; inne Sæxe-londe. whær-swa æi duȝeðe gladieð of drenche; þat freond sæiðe to freonde; mid fæire loten hende. Leofue freond wæs hail; Þe oðer sæið Drinc hail. Þe ilke þat halt þene nap; he hine drinkeð up. o[ð]er uuel me þider fareð; & bi-thecheð his iuerenþenne þat uul beoð icumen; þenne cusseoð heo þreoien. Þis beoð sele laȝen; inne Saxe-londe.& inne Alemaine; heo beoð ihalden aðele.

This extract is taken from ‘A Man of Heart' by Liam Guilar, published by Shearsman in January 2023. The Venerable Bede dated this event to 450 AD. The British, attacked on all sides, abandoned by Rome, hired mercenaries to help them to fight their enemies. Traditionally, they hired three boat loads of ‘Germanic Warriors', led by Hengist and his brother, Horsa. On the beach watching them depart is his daughter, Rowena, who will play a significant role in subsequent events. Their story is told in 'A Man of Heart.'

Michael Alexander's translations of Old English poetry, published by Penguin Classics, were my introduction to the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. His translation of Beowulf, carefully preserving the alliterative sound of the poem, was a ‘best seller' in the world of translations. ‘Beowulf Reduced' is his tongue in cheek synopsis of the story, cutting three thousand lines down to fifteen. It was published in Alexander's 'Here At The Door' by Shoestring Press in 2021

Robert Browning (1812-1889) There's a story. A bemused reader asked Browning what this poem meant. ‘Well,' said the poet, ‘when I wrote it only God and Robert Browning knew. Now only God knows.' Sadly this conversation didn't take place, and the comment was most likely made by a character called Robert Browning in a play. But it's worth keeping in mind. There's nothing wrong with worrying about ‘what it means' but a better question with this poem is what does it do to you while you hear it or read it. What do the images suggest, the words evoke? Go along for the ride and experience the story before you start worrying about what it means. The irrational came into English Literature at the end of the 18th Century with the first wave of Gothic literature. It was given substance in English poetry by Coleridge, and you can trace it through the 19th century. Browning's Childe Roland and Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market are two of the finest examples. Stephen's King ‘Dark Tower' series ostensibly begins as a riff on this poem. But if you want a version, then Louise MacNeice's play ‘The Dark Tower' does a better job of capturing the spirit of the original.

Macbeth Act five, scene five, lines 18-28 Why Shakespeare? It's a question generations of students have asked. One of the good answers is that the plays contain passages like this where you can enjoy the way a few words can be made to do a great deal of work. Words associated with time, mortality, the stage, images of transience and futility, all coalesce in that last magnificent sentence to present one of the most nihilistic views of life in English. Life is brief, death is dusty. There is no afterlife, no possible redemption. If there is a God overseeing it all, he she or it is an idiot. You live your life as an actor in a play, unable to make your own decisions, a puppet of the script and the director. But you're not even a  good actor, you're clumsy, you have a bit part and if life were a film when the credits roll you can only appear as ‘man walking dog across street', or ‘girl third from right in crowd'. You don't even have the consolation that you took part in a masterpiece,. You're trapped in a trivial story,  written by an idiot, and it means nothing. It's not only nihilistic, it's also startlingly unchristian, And then you should remember that this is a speech by a specific character at a specific moment in the play. Macbeth has made bad choices from the start. He is about to be held accountable for them. What better self-defence than to claim he had no choice? The speech may be nihilistic, but the play contradicts everything he says. He's lying to himself. Very clever that  Mr. William Shakespeare. Wrote some good lines.

Jeremy Hooker. (Born 1941) I'm assuming this poem was written to commemorate the Hundredth Anniversary of the first day of the Somme offensive in 1916. When i was at school we learnt the statistics; 60,00 casualties, 20, 00 of them dead. In one morning, between 7.30am and “lunch time”. By the end of the battle, which got them nowhere, when the snows closed it down in November, British, Empire and Allied troops had suffered over half a million casualties. While historians might debate the significance of the battle and the actual casuality figures, (57,470 of which 19,240 died). The image of men lined up in rows and ordered to advance into machine gun fire was a dark shadow on the collective imagination, made more terrible by the fact they were fighting in a ‘war to end wars'. Hooker shows how effective a poem can be without the poet having to resort to distorted syntax, complex rhyme schemes or obscure allusions. The tragedy is summed up …'the old men/that we knew and the young men/we did not.' He also deftly suggests a difference between then and now in its play on ‘divisions.' The poem is taken from Hooker's excellent ‘Word and Stone' (Sheearsman 2019).

I read the poem Requiem by Anna Akhmatova' on a previous podcast. Several things made this poem happen. WHile Akhmatova lived through Stalin's times, many of the people who persecuted her are now forgotten, they are just ‘footnotes in her history'. I used her poem as part of a unit on poetry in translation. I would tell the story of how, when it was being written, she would write the new verses on cigarette paper. She would show them silently to her friend, who would nod when she had memorised the lines, then they would burn the paper. Classes often found this most moving part of her story. But at the end of every lesson, there'd be at least one of the printed copies of the poem left in the classroom, often dropped on the floor. Once one of the papers had a foot print on it. The poem first appeared in the Irish Journal , The SHOp, and was then chosen for ‘The SHOp, An Anthology of Poetry', their ‘best of' collection.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) If it weren't for the rhymes, this poem feels as though it could have been written by Thomas Hardy. Kipling could be tub thumpingly obvious when he wanted to be, riding a steady rhythm that takes his poems close to sing song. Here rhythm and rhyme are used to contribute to the way that he suggests a mood and a place and a story and leaves them to settle into the reader's imagination.

Anna Akhmatova 1869-1966 ‘Requiem' is Akhmatova's memorial for those who waited with her outside the prison in Saint Petersburg in the 1930s, hoping for news of their loved ones during ‘the terrible years of the Yezhov Terror'. The context of the poem is explained properly in the second section, a prose ‘By way of a preface'. Some sections have titles, others numbers. This translation, by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward is taken from ‘Twentieth century Russian Poetry; Silver and steel, An anthology'. Selected and Introduced by Yevgeny Yevthushenko, edited by Albert. C. Todd and Max Hayward. ( Doubleday 1993)

The full title of this poems is: 'Lines written on a seat on the Grand Canal , Dublin, 'Erected to the memory of Mrs Dermot O'Brien' It belongs to a cluster he wrote later in life, and his friends took him at his word, clubbed together and made him a memorial which you can see in the picture. One cold December day in Dublin, before google maps, I set out to walk to the canal to find the statue. I found it, and Raglan Road which is near by, but that bench seat is metal. You have to be dedicated to sit there long enough to have your photo taken when the temperature is hovering round zero. . You can also hear a reading of 'Kerr's Ass', one of his best poems, on the poetry voice podcast.

Taliesin (6th Century) There are at least two Taliesin's. There was an Historical bard who composed poetry in the courts of ‘Welsh Princes' in the Sixth Century, a contemporary of Aneirin. There was also a character from a folk tale, who gained knowledge and inspiration from a cauldron he was stirring, and after many transformations was born again as a miraculous child who could speak as soon as he was born and went on to be a magician and prophet as well as a poet. The Book of Taliesin is one of those precious medieval manuscripts which are worth their weight in Guttenberg bibles. It dates from the 14th century, and the two figures have obviously merged. Brilliant scholars have spent their careers trying to untangle the poems, trying to date which may belong to the Historical Bard and which have been attributed to him. Most seem to think this one might be ‘authentic'. It's a marvellous controlled howl of a poem that belongs to a very different world. “King' and ‘Prince' dignify men who spent their lives raiding and being raided by their neighbours. Enthusiastic cattle thieves. It's also a world where poetry served a very public function and the poet was an honoured member of the court. Taliesin laments the dead Owein by celebrating highlights from his ruthless destruction of his enemies. The highest praise possible is to state that he was a generous, ferocious killer. The line 'Medel galon geueilat' could be translated almost literally as ‘A reaper of foes, a predator'. This translation is taken from The Book of Taliesin, Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain, translated by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams. Penguin Classics 2020 My pronunciation is not up to inflicting the original on an audience, but if you can, find a Welsh speaker reading the original.

Alun Lewis (1915-1944) Considered by some to be one of the few great poets to serve and write during the second world war. This is his take on the myth of Leda and the Swan. Zeus turns himself into a swan to rape leda, and Helen of Troy is born. It's been a subject in art since Classical times. Yeats wrote a fine poem on the same subject. But in Lewis' version the God disguised as Swan is stricken by an understanding of what he's done. Such remorse rarely figures in either the pictures or the stories.

Two poems, written some years apart. The modern admiration for the action hero seems like a childish escape into fantasy, until you realise the implications. Real heroism, the courage to keep going on a daily basis where there is no simple victory, no cheering crowd, no prize, goes unnoticed. These heroics number one is takes from I'll Howl before you bury me. These heroics number two from Rough spun to Close Weave. Both are still available from www.liamguilar.com (A note on pronunciation. There are at least two ways of pronouncing Cuchulainn. I naturalised mine from Irish speakers I grew up with. At university I was told: ‘Oh Guilar, you mean Cah Hool lin'. He said it in such a patronising way, in his bow tie English Accent, that I have stuck with what I started with. )

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) I first encountered Thomas's writing when I was in high school. naturally, it had nothing to do with school, I found the recording of Under Milkwood in the city record library. Richard Burton reading First Voice ! I was captivated by the astonishing sound scape, and the humour of the script. From there I went to the short stories in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog, an obsession it took a decade to escape. The poems I was never sure about. There were some that were immediately attractive, And Death shall have no Dominion, Do not go gentle into that good night, (both read on the Poetry Voice) but most of the poems baffled my desire for a prose sense. Your response to Thomas's poems is always going to reveal a lot about what you appreciate in a poem. If you like sound, they are magnificent. It's very difficult not to read 'The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower' without launching into an imitation of an ecstatic revivalist preacher pounding the pulpit. It took me several takes to escape from it. If you are looking for prose sense you may be disappointed. If you're looking for original ideas you will be looking in the wrong place. The idea in the poem, all living things are linked, is hardly new. But that in no way detracts from the drive of the syntax. This poem is a good antidote to those who confuse poetry and philosophy. If you want rationally argued philosophy or theology stop being lazy and read the philosophers and the theologians. And if you pay too much attention this poem also seems to be in two halves. The first two quatrains are magnificent, but then the force of the repeated ‘the force that'….is dissipated. If you think too long about the statements in the rest of the poem you might start to ask the wrong questions and undermine the rhetorical flourish. You might even wonder if Thomas, young as he was when he wrote this, found himself with eight magnificent lines and had no real idea what to do with them. Or you might just sit back and go with the marvellous surge of the verse.

Susan Watson The Time of the Angels is a sequence of poems in which a young woman reads and re-reads Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur during the winter and spring of 1979. She is researching and writing an undergraduate dissertation, but her encounter with Malory is also a highly personal one; she perceives the centrality of ‘chances, choices, prophecies, destinies, past and future time' and responds to an atmosphere of ‘loss soaking backwards through the pages like a tide receding'. And there is Malory's voice: ‘a plain voice, threading beads'. The Pamphlet is available from https://www.lulu.com/en/au/shop/susan-watson/the-time-of-the-angels/paperback/product-8ddjjw.html?page=1&pageSize=4

William Blake (1757-1827) For some, Blake is the great visionary poet of the 18/19th century. He had to wait a long time until his reputation and position amongst some critics was established. He can still seem like a peripheral character who became lost in his own private mythology. There's an odd sense generated in some corners of poetry world that you have to like or admire certain poets. As much as I admire this particular poem, and it is undeniably a great poem and a fine work of social criticism, I am bored by the majority of Blake's poetry, especially the longer works. There was a time I thought this was a failure on my part and I should apologise for it. The result of a lack of intelligence or a failure of critical acumen. But one of the great liberations in reading poetry comes when you realise that you don't have to like anything. Think music. There are fans of Wagner who don't like Purcell, and fans of guitar based music who don't like The Stones. Or literature, there are educated people who see no greatness in James Joyce and think T.S.Eliot was a fraud. Read widely, dismiss nothing at first encounter, listen to other people and their preferences, but don't be deterred from the effort to find what you love.

Byron in Venice (The poet in exile) The debris of a city in decline slops at the crumbling steps, as the sun sets over palaces  even dusk can't dignify.  The clock strikes, he puts down the page and calls for servants. Suddenly cannot remember if he is to meet the opera singer or the serving maid.  No matter how elaborate the choreography, his hands run free, his mind completes the rhyme. Afterwards, duty done, excuses made,  he'll coax these stanzas to their climax  and scrawl defiance on the blank of time's indifference, graffiti on the walls of history.  He has explored the tangled pathways of his heart and written travelogues for those who stayed at home.  If that leads here, to age and desolation; the fading light, broken on the Grand Canal, where life is repetition, and even lust grows stale; the boys and women he has loved  the friends he misses as he dines alone, faded signatures on bundled letters, locks of hair, old arguments the night returns; if it leads here; beyond the poem, what remains?  An aging face, once beautiful,   staring through its own reflection, soliciting an audience to dignify the commonplace as art? I wrote this after reading Byron's letters. All twelve volumes. I was thinking about what it means to write, to live abroad, to use writing to organise memory. What happens when a commonplace experience or emotion is written about by a master like Byron? Is there any point to writing poetry? The poem is taken from ‘From Rough Spun to Close Weave'. Signed copies are available from the shop at www. Liamguilar.com Otherwise available at online book sellers.

Miroslav Holub, (1923 –1998) Holub lived in Prague, and worked as an immunologist. He wrote a paper called ‘The Immunology of Nude Mice'. His obituary appeared in the New York Times. He also wrote wonderful poems. ‘Napoleon' is also on the Poetry Voice, and as with that poem, versions of history collide, and the wit and the critical point will make themselves apparent if you let them. This translation is taken from Heaney and Hughes' ‘The Rattle Bag' and the translation is by George Theiner.

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) It's one of the superficial oddities of English poetry that the First World War produced an enormous amount of poetry, some of which has entered the Canon, while the Second didn't. It's only a superficial oddity,; culture and education had changed dramatically. However, this short poem, by the American poet and critic, Randall Jarrell, is one of the most memorable poems written in the twentieth century about war. Part of the horror of the poem lies in the unemotional voice of the anonymous speaker. Apart from his position in the Ball Turret, he could be anyone. The last line is difficult, not just because of the flat way it describes the aftermath of a young man's death, but because of the way it's written. It feels like it's too long. Like the experience of hosing a body out of an aircraft. As an example of an image being allowed to convey message, without the poet preaching, it's very very good. If you want an anti-war poem, I'd choose this over something like Dulce Et Decorum est. Incidentally, there's several comments online about this poem ‘being about abortion'. It's not. It's about the death of a young man in the Ball Turret of a bomber.

You can hear this poem read in its original Welsh at the superb University of Swansea site dedicated to Dafydd and his work.Unfortunately it won't let me link directly to the poem:Click on this link…which will open a new window.http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/eng/3win.phpChoose poem 82 from the drop down menu in the left hand corner, then click the ‘audio' link at the bottom of the page.

Luis Quintais (1968-) You can read about Luis Quintais, a poet writing in Portuguese as well as this translation and four other others by clicking on the link below. It will open in a new page.. https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/15/poems-by-luis-quintais-translated-from-the-portuguese-by-lesley-saunders/ This is a good example of what happens when one fine poet translates another. We live in a great age of translation. Which means we have access to poetry in languages you've probably never considered.

This poem is taken from 'Rough Spun to Close Weave'. A listener asked for the text of the poem as well. After the Funerals one by one they take their leave; parting without formal courtesies startled by the shock, again, as one by one they take their leave. Affection, understanding, even knowing what there was to value, come too late: gifts delivered past their use by dates. 2 The plane strains upwards in the night, banks, and there, below the city that we thought we knew; drab streets, a park, its monuments, some houses where the welcome meant we didn't want to leave, revealed as glowing labyrinth: vast, intricate and beautiful. Too late we realise, again, how much there was to learn before the detail disappears, becomes a pool of light shrinking to a faint glow in the skies behind us as we head towards another dawn. 3 So one by one they leave stories that I didn't understand and now forget, lives whittled back to facts and dates no one contests or verifies. Box brownie photos in an old shoebox? Left trying, once again, to reconstruct a map I never stopped to memorise.

Hafez, 1315 (?) -1398/90) We live in a great age of translation, and there's no excuse for not exploring poetries other than English. Hafez is one of the world's great poets, in one of the history's great literatures, and Dick Davis is one of the great translators. Ironically i first came across both of them in an essay Davis wrote called ‘On not Translating Hafez'. This poem is taken from Davis' ‘Faces of Love: Hafez and the poets of Shiraz' Mage Publishers 2012/2019

‘Prudentius', Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. (348-405?) Originally written in Latin, this poem was part of a contemporary theological argument. This sounds dour, but it rocks along in Martha M. Malamud's translation. The section I've read here is about free will. Prudentius argues that when God gave man power over the beasts, he also gave him power over himself. The first five or so lines I've read here present the point of view that Prudentius is arguing against. Therefore good and evil are choices we make. A man with no choice, who is forced to do good, cannot be good. The first five or so lines I've read here present the point of view that Prudentius is arguing against. Strikingly, for all the misogyny of the poem, when Prudentius comes to relate the genesis story of Adam and Eve, although he doesn't name Eve, he doesn't blame her either. Adam had a choice, and he made it. He choose to do what he knew was wrong. Therefore he, and no one else, was to blame for his actions. Given the medieval habit of blaming Eve for ‘The Fall' it's a striking departure from the normal way the story is presented. Malamud claims that Milton would have known this poem, and and she points out, it's fascinating to read the whole poem with Paradise Lost in mind. This reading is taken from ‘The Origin of Sin, An English Translation of the Hamartigenia', by Martha. A Malamud. (2011) lines 879-957.

Jeremy Hooker (born 1941) I don't often read two consecutive poems from the same poet, but I wanted to hear this one. It's taken from Hooker's 'Selected Poems (1965-2018)' published 2020 by Shearsman books

Jeremy Hooker (Born 1941) Shearsman published Hooker's Selected poems (1965-2018) in 2020. It's an impressive body of work, through provoking, moving, and very enjoyable to read. I like the way this poem uses a single, familiar (If you live near the coast) image to explore a complex idea, and resists the temptation to shut down the exploration with a neat conclusion. I also like the way the poem never loses sight of the physical world. The gull and the post are always a gull and a post, carefully observed, rather than a convenient symbol for the poet's musings. He's right about Gulls' eyes.

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) Like many things in Alice in Wonderland, this was a parody, but the target has long been consigned to the footnotes. It is what it is: Carroll's control of rhyme and rhythm seems effortless. It's certainly enviable. And the poem is memorably funny. I'm probably not the only one to remember hearing ‘I have answered three questions and that is enough' or ‘be off and don't give yourself airs' quoted by an exasperated adult.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) ‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers'. Says it all really. This reading was a request. Which reminds me to point out that if you have a poem you'd like to hear read on the Podcast you can send your request via the contact form on www.liamguilar.com or to my author page on facebook. Some poems don't work well read aloud, and some just don't work when I read them. I can't promise there will be no parrots, dogs or traffic in the background, but i'll see what I can do. On the website you'll also find an index of all 159 poems that have been read so far.

Meirion Jordan (Born 1985) This is the second of two readings of poems based on the Welsh prose Mabinogion. This is taken from Meirion Jordan's ‘Regeneration/Redbook'. While Mathew Francis retells the stories, (see previous Podcast) Jordan uses his poems to respond to them. Based on the stories, but treating them aslant, his poems raise the question of whether a poem like this works if you don't know the story. Or even if they do work when you do know the background. In the Mabinogion Arawn appears in the first branch. Seas of ink have been split over the translation of ‘Annwn' or ‘Annwfn'. Though sometimes translated as Hell, it lacks the negative overtones of the Christian version, and in both irish and Welsh literature ‘the other world' is not a bad place to visit. in the First Branch of the Mabinogion, after meeting Arawn, Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, is able to ride to Annwn where he spends a thoroughly enjoyable year feasting, hunting and carousing.

This extract is taken from ‘The Mabinogi', (Faber 2017), Francis' retelling of the first four stories in the collection of eleven Medieval Welsh prose stories printed in English as The Mabinogion. The Mabinogi is the name given to the first four stories. In this extract from the first story, Pwyll, who is prince of Dyfed, has been told that if he sits on Gorsedd Arberth, a hill overlooking his court, one of two things will happen: wounds or blows, or he will see a wonder. Because he is with an armed retinue he isn't worried about being struck and wounded. As they sit on the hill, they see a rider approaching. Although she seems to be ambling past, the boy sent to run after her cannot catch her. On the second day Pwyll sends a rider. No matter how fast threader drives his horse, she increases the gap between them without changing her pace. On the third day Pwyll himself tries to catch her, and is failing miserably when he asks her to stop. Gladly she says, and it would have been better for your horse if you'd asked a lot sooner. Francis' poem is not a translation, but a retelling that stays close to the original. But he captures the dreamlike quality of the original, and suggests that what we're reading is both event and metaphor. You can read a brief discussion the whole book here: here (Clicking on the link will take you to a page on WWW.Liamguilar.com). If you want to read a prose version of The Mabinogion in modern English, Sioned Davis' version for Oxford World Classics (2008/2018) is justifiably famous.

Dick Davis (Born 1945) Widely regarded as the leading English translator of Persian Poetry, Davis is also a fine poet, as his Collected poems, ‘Love in Another Language', demonstrates. In this poem his fluency with rhyming couplets allows the humour of the nightmare to swing. And the humour doesn't hide the serious point that's being made, that no matter how good the translator, there must be times when he or she wonders what would happen if they met up with their source in the hereafter. And then, what about the poets you didn't translate?

‘Coke' in this sense, is fuel for a fire. Thought cleaner than coal, it was much harder to light. This poem is taken from Rough Spun to Close Weave which is still available from online booksellers or direct from the shop on WWW.Liamguilar.com.

John Keats (1795-1821) Sometimes poetry is the memorable expression of a commonplace thought. Keats, more than most, was haunted by the threat of an early death.  A dedicated poet, he wanted to be ‘amongst the English poets at my death'. He died of Tuberculosis, in his mid twenties, a long way from home, coughing his lungs up in a rented room in Italy and he felt he'd failed. The epitaph he choose for himself, ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water', sums up his disappointment. Amongst the unfinished epics and plays, he'd written a handful of poems that guaranteed his place in any anthology of English poetry. But he didn't know that when he died.

George Herbert 1593-1633 Herbert was a priest, and his poetry has been described as ‘some of the most moving devotional poetry in the English Language'. But often, as in this poem, the relationship between priest and god, is strained. ‘The collar' runs on a series of puns, some depending on spellings and usage which are not longer current, and which may not be evident in a reading. A collar was a yoke, but also a priest's collar, a sign of service. It's also a way of being caught, and an aural pun on choler, or anger. A board was a table, but also the altar. Free as the rode is free as the road and free as the rode (the Cross). ‘Still in suit' puns on both Still and suit…And so on. He was Donne's contemporary after all. Of all Herbert's poems why this one? For very non religious reasons. It reminds of those moments when study becomes onerous; progress isn't progressing, time and effort seem wasted and the thought of doing anything that will give an immediate return, no matter how trivial, becomes so very attractive. Having flung the grammars at the wall, and sworn to never open them again, sooner or later the voice is chiding…childe….calling you back to the necessities of discipline. Herbert has been the subject of a fine biography: Music at Midnight by John Drury. Penguin published his complete English poems. Mark Oakley's, ‘My Sour Sweet Days, George Herbert and the Journey fo the Soul' is a gentle thoughtful non-academic introduction.

Alfred De Musset (1810-1857) The woman in question was not dead. According to the translator, Stanley Appelbaum, ‘The ‘Morte' of the poem, the Princess Belgiojoso, was not at all dead but coquettishly indifferent to the poet's advances.' This is taken from “Introduction to French Poetry' edited by Stanley Appelbaum, who claims in his introduction that the translations are ‘definitely not intended to be poetic recreations of the original works, but merely aids to the understanding of the content'. In this case the English version seems to stand on its own..

The Archpoet (12th century) ‘The Archpoet' is the name given to a writer of a handful of Latin lyrics of which this ‘Confession' is the most famous. Almost nothing is known about his identity or the details of his life. Imagine a priest or monk, accused of a string of vices. The ‘Confession' confronts the accusations and gleefully admits to them all. There's a debate about whether it's genuinely autobiographical or a rhetorical exercise, and that is unlikely to be answered. But the poem was popular in its own time: the attraction of saying, yes, I am all the things you say I am and why should I not be, may have been as powerful then as it is now, especially amongst people who do none of the things they'd like to admit to having done. The translation is by Helen Waddell and taken from ‘The Wandering Scholars' which is one of the great books about the middle ages. Waddell claimed this poem ‘is something more than the arch-type of a generation of vagabond scholars, or the greatest drinking song in the world: it is the first defiance by the artist of that society which it is his thankless business to amuse: the first cry from the House of the Potter, "Why hast thou made me thus?".( (p.265) Enjoy.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) There was a time poems entered the language and were recycled in daily usage. And ‘If' is perhaps one of the best examples of such a poem. It has been voted Britain's Most popular poem, though I suspect that day has passed. It's full of good advice, memorably expressed. Nowhere does it suggest you need counselling or a handbook of excuses. But I can also imagine a Victorian father giving his son such a lecture, and the son walking out thinking, well, that's that then. Not possible. Can't do it. Might as well become some kind of debauched failure of a chronic sinner right now.

Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) (Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L Gill) For those outside Spain, who read no Spanish, Lorca is probably the most famous Spanish poet of the twentieth century. This is a very different poem to the ones I've previously read on the podcast. It helps, listening to this poem or reading it, to remember Lorca was friends with Dali and Bunuel. There is a story that when those two were making 'Un Chien Andalou', their ground breaking surrealist film, one would sketch scenes and the other would say, no, that means something, throw it out. ‘Avant Garde' or ‘Surrealist' are terms that might be useful as pathways to approach this poem without necessarily being definitive or even accurate as labels. For a long time I used this poem as an example of what happens when readers are confronted with work they find initially incomprehensible. Read it, I'd say, then come back and tell me what you think it means. The answers were often ingenious. They varied greatly. They were all interesting. So what does it mean they'd ask. It means what it says. Images that link without narrative, suggesting narrative, cohering because they linked in the writer's mind at the time of writing. The links are not made explicit. But the images sing together. Yes, but what does it mean? Wrong question. This is taken from ‘The Selected poems of Federico Garcia Lorca' edited by Francisco Garcia Lorca and Donald m. Allen. A New Directions paperback 1985.

Christopher Logue (1926-2011) This is my second reading from ‘War Music'. In the first, Patroculus has begged Achilles for the loan of his armour. When Achilles reluctantly agrees, he insists that no matter how successful Patroculus is he must not chase the Trojans to their city. Apollo, the Mouse God, is present and on the Trojan's side. After a day of staggering success, Patroculus ignores the interdiction and chases the Trojans to the walls of their city. This extract begins as he tries to scale the walls of Troy.

Christopher Logue (1926-2011) A fine poet in his own work, Logue's most lasting achievement should be his ‘account' of Homer's Iliad. He didn't called his work a translation. In 1959 he was asked to translate a section of the Iliad for a radio performance. In his memoire, ‘Prince Charming' (p.221), he relates that when he pointed out he knew no Greek, he was told:. ‘Read translations by those who did. Follow the story. A translator must know one language well. Preferably his own.' It is an unusual piece of advice, and not one usually given to translators. The results, however, were spectacular, appearing as separate books, until in 2016 they were collected and published as ‘War Music; an account of Homer's Iliad'. I would describe it as one of the great narrative achievements in English Poetry. Although neither finished nor pedantically ‘accurate', it makes Homer attractive. However, as an introduction to Homer its one drawback is that it makes the standard translations of the Iliad seem very dull.