 Hello, and welcome to our video summarizing all you need to know about the poems of the decade anthology. My name is Barbara, and in this video we'll examine all of the poems contained within this anthology. We'll also look at the biographies of each of the poets, as well as examining in detail the analysis that you should consider when you're comparing these poems, as well as the relevant poems that you can cross-compare from the anthology. So let's get started. The anthology begins with the poem Eat Me, but patience Agbabi. A little bit about the author herself. Agbabi is well known for her performances as her writing blurs the boundaries between performance poet and page poet, and she does this with many other boundaries including both racial and sexual. She was born in London in 1965 to Nigerian parents and fostered by white English parents in North Wales. She was educated at Oxford University and she's appeared at numerous venues in the UK and abroad. And RAW, her groundbreaking debut of collection of poetry was published in 1955. When it comes to her work as a poet, she combines experiments and performance, including being a member of Atomic Lib, which is poetry's first pop group, with a fascination with traditional poetic forms and the use of persona to explore her themes. She's undertaken many residencies and her work has been broadcast in TV and radio. Now, when we consider Eat Me and how this poem combines both patience Agbabi's background but equally the themes contained within the poems, the poem itself is an audacious, dramatic monologue which examines an extreme kind of unhealthy relationship. Agbabi uses relationship between the feeder and the feedee to explore issues of gender and power. That the concerns of the poem are not confined solely to sexual politics is hinted through some of the language used to describe the woman's body, forbidden fruit, breadfruit, desert island, globe and tidal wave are just some of the terms the poem uses to describe the woman's body. These suggest a post-colonial viewpoint in which the colonial authority, identified with the pale protagonist, is ultimately overwhelmed by the power of the Fomar colony. However, this dimension is hinted at subtly. The power of the poem lies in the voice of the narrator and the vividness with which her situation is described. Patterns of alliteration, assonance, repetition, combined to convey a cloying sensuousness which mirrors the excess described. Read aloud, the reader can't help but be sensitized to the mouth and tongue. The rhyme or the half rhyme scheme of ABA further increases the sense of claustrophobia in the poem. In these ways, the subject's physicality is enacted at the level of language. The ending of the poem is quite shocking and worth thinking about in terms of the poet's attitude towards consumption and where this might eventually lead. When you're looking at this poem, the other poems that you should consider in this collection are Caroline Duffy's poem, The Map Woman, as this could open up the representations or discussions about the representations of the female body. The second poem in this collection is Chainsaw vs. the Pampas Grass by Simon Armitage. Now, Simon Armitage is one of UK's best known and loved poet. He was born in the village of Marsden and he lives in West Yorkshire, and until 1994 he worked as a probation officer in Greater Manchester, which is an interesting and very unconventional background for a poet. His prose work also includes two novels and a best-selling memoir. He's received numerous awards including being shortlisted five times for the Tia Elliott Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writers of the Year, the Keith Shelley Prize and the National Critics Circle Award in the USA, and he was also awarded a CBE in 2010 for his work in poetry. So now when it comes to the poem itself, The Chainsaw vs. the Pampas Grass, this poem is a real tour de force of physical description, with both the chainsaw and the Pampas Grass vividly personified. Patterns of imagery suggest a gender dimension to the confrontation, the adjectives used to describe the chainsaw and the way it operates associated with traditional forms of male behaviour. In contrast, initially at least, the Pampas Grass is seen as decorative and passive. By the end of the poem, it's a seemingly fragile Pampas Grass that continues to flourish. The chainsaw, and by inference the narrator, is reduced to impotence. Moreover, the power dynamic between what is a man-made piece of machinery and a natural, albeit cultivated, plant implies a broader struggle that reaches beyond the borders of a suburban garden. This wider context is hinted at in the shifting language in the last two stanzas, which move beyond the earlier conversational circle, tipping the balance towards a more lyrical tone, daylight moon, and also wider historical cultural considerations, for instance, horn in Egypt and count back across time, which both feature in the poem. As with many Armitage poems, how far the narrator is an invented persona is interesting to consider. Stylistically, the poem is convincingly conversational, with its mixture of long and short sentences, its relaxed line and standard, the lengths, and its informal tone. Knocked back, gone the trigger, I laughed it at that. However, the poem is also highly patent and a highly crafted piece of writing, which deploys rich imagery and extensive use of sound, including rhyme, alliteration, and abstinence to convey emotional and physical aspects of the narrative. Now, when it comes to comparing this poem to other poems across the collection, when it comes to comparing this poem, you should think about other poems written in the first person, which can be instructive and provides ground for debates on how far the eye of a poem can ever be identified the poet. This poem might sit somewhere between a more personal poem like Inheritance by Even Boland and Ian Duhigg's The Lammer's Hyreling, which is clearly spoken by a fictional narrator. The third poem in this collection is Material by Ross Berber. Sir Barber was born in Washington D.C. to British parents and she grew up in Essex, but moved to Brighton in the south coast of England at the age of 18. An academic poet and a novelist, she was well known as an expert on the Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, the inspiration behind her first novel, The Marlowe Papers, which reimagines Marlowe as the pen behind the works of Shakespeare. She's also written three collections of poetry, the most recent material being a Poetry Book Society recommendation. She's also a visiting research fellow at the University of Sussex, a lecturer in Goldsmith and a director of research at the Shakespearean Authorship Trust. Now when it comes to the poem itself, in this tightly rhymed poem, a single object, an old-fashioned lace hanky, becomes a way of invoking a varnished pre-decimal world of local shopkeepers, dance schools, and family-run department stores. With great economy and the use of vivid detail, the narrator of the poem takes us back to her childhood and in particular, her relationship with her mother. This poem moves from this past into the present and a consideration of the narrator's own role as mother and how this differs from the experience of earlier generations. The title has interesting resonance in the light of these generational concerns, referring both to the actual material the hankies are made of, so different from modern disposable tissues, and how we're shaped by our mothers and shape our children in turn. The phrase raw materials hovers behind the title, reminding us of the importance of nature in creating character. The poem is interestingly ambivalent about the lost world as symbolized by the hanky. The narrator recognizes her own nostalgia for an era when community ties were stronger and mothers would stay at home homemakers with time for ironing and baking. But even back then, the poem implies she was impatient with the formalities represented by the hankies. For instance, the poem states, the naffest Christmas gift you'd get and the social constraints of the period. It was a world with no room for individual creative expression where people, especially women and girls, had to step together, step together. However, contemporary motherhood is still hard to square with self-hood, requiring the compromise of television and shop-bought biscuits to get the time to write. The regular rhyme scheme of the poem, A-B-C-B-D-E-F-E, is suggestive of the more formal era the poet is evoking. It also suggests the constraints which surpassed still places on the narrator. Other poems we can compare material to Caroline Duffy's Map Woman, which shouts a similar kind of society, whilst also Inheritance by Even Boland reflects on this theme, though using a very different approach and tone. The fourth poem in this collection is Inheritance by Even Boland. Now, when it comes to Boland herself, she's an Irish woman, mother, poet, and exile, and she gave rise to, and rather, Even Boland's mother gave rise to her own poetry. She's now recognised as one of the foremost voices in Irish literature. Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 24 September 1944, interestingly just a year before the end of the Second World War. Her father was a diplomat and her mother an expressionist painter. At the age of six, Boland and her family relocated to London, where she first encountered Irish anti-Irish sentiment. She later returned to Dublin for school and received her BA from Trinity College in 1966, and she's also educated in London and New York. Her early work is informed by experiences as a young wife and mother and her growing awareness of the troubled role of women in Irish society and culture. Irish myth and history have remained important sources of inspiration and her poems offer fresh perspectives on traditional themes. She's also the author of many books and essays, as well as criticisms featuring a variety of her work. She's also won numerous awards which are outlined here. Now, when it comes to the inheritance, the poet starts with the idea of wandering, which sets the tone for the poem's quiet, introverted quality. This is not a poem of dramatic gesture or noisy declamation. The informality of the poem's structure, the irregular stanzas, the relaxed sentences, contributes to the impression of someone thinking aloud. While the poem is ostensibly personal, there's a political and historical dimension in its focus on specifically female forms of inheritance. Prior to the Married Women's Property Act of 1870, a woman entering into a marriage in the UK had to give up ownership of her personal property, which was automatically transferred to her husband who could choose to dispose of it as he wished. And of course, poor people, whether women or men, have always struggled to accumulate any kind of physical property to leave behind. Bolen refers to just such a history of want, focusing instead on other kinds of inheritance, such as traditional craft skills and the anxieties of motherhood. The poem's moving closure acknowledges that, in the face of a child's illness, what connects her to mothers of previous generations is love, worry and powerlessness. The child gets better because the fever runs its course, not because she knows the secrets of health and air. When you compare this to other poems in the collection, one poem to think about is Sheamus Haney's Out of the Bag, which makes an interesting contrast with Bolen's own poem. Both consider the effect of the past and the present, but the approach is very different, with Haney choosing to focus on a specific family memory while Bolen contemplates the past in more general terms. The other poem in this collection is The Leisure Centre is also a Temple of Learning by Susan Basu Boil. Now, Su Boil lives in Bath, where she organizes the Bath Poetry Cafe and the associated cafe workshops and cafe writing days. Her work has also been published in several leading poetry magazines, and her collection, called Too Late for Love Hotel, was a winner in the 2009 Book and Pamphlet competition. When it comes to the poem itself, this poem brings together the modern and the ancient. It combines the secular and the religious in a very surprising and witty way. The title itself encapsulates this lively dynamic, describing a leisure centre as a temple in an unusual and an interestingly intriguing way. For the majority of the poem, the temple seems to belong to the young girl, who is both goddess and worshiper combined. Modern references, flexed and toned, chemicals exfoliant, all which feature in the poem, give way to languages reminiscent of the Old Testament's Songs of Songs or Song of Solomon, its lavish, exotic and sensual. The girl is compared to all kinds of natural beauty. Leopard, sand, willow, waterfall, listening bird, cream and raspberries are used in this description. This sense of exotic beauty is matched by her actions as she performs her elaborate cleansing ritual. In essence, the girl is worshipping her own body and its potential for love and sensual pleasure. The main tonal shift in this poem comes in the last three lines which are blunt in the warning about what happens next. Each line is end-stopped and stark in its effect. The focus shifts from an individual to a group of women who become the chorus. In Greek drama, the chorus form a single entity commenting on the dramatic action. They represent the general population of the particular story in contrast to those characters taking centre stage, which tend to be famous heroes, kings, gods and goddesses. The word might also refer to the chorus of women or daughters of Jerusalem who appear in the Song of Songs as an audience or witness to the sensual love of the protagonist. Finally, these lines also point to post-Christian symbolism. The twelve women suggesting the twelve apostles, followed by Jesus. While the theme of youth and ageing might be a serious one, the pleasure the poem takes in the language used to describe the girl and the dark humour of its ending give the poem a light and enjoyable touch. Now, when you're considering other poems to link it to, for a very different take on the gap between youth and experience, have a look at Helen Dunmose to my nine-year-old self, where the relationships between observer and observed is more intimate. The other poem in this collection is History by John Burnside. So Burnside is the author of thirteen collections of poetry, as well as novels, short stories and the memoir receiving wide critical praise across all these genres. He was born in Scotland, however he moved away in 1965, returning to settle there in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and for ten years a computer systems designer. Burnside's central concerns have remained remarkably consistent across his work, though his manner of investigating them has evolved over time. Intensely lyric on style, his poems engage deeply with questions of the self and our relationship with the natural world. His poems often blurred the boundaries between the self and the other, and whether that's the spirit, the animal world or the past. His poems are fraught with glimpsed presences, ghosts, angels, ancestors and our own unlived lives. Now, when it comes to the poem itself, the dating of the poem sets the context. The immediate aftermath of those taxed the Twin Towers in New York in 2001. This event, history with a capital H, casts a shadow over the whole poem. Though the poem is called history, it begins with the word today. Throughout the poem, the big events symbolised by the warplanes are set against the present moment. The beach, parents playing with their child, that child's absorption of the physical world. The poem suggests that paying attention to the world's transience and beauty might act as a kind of antidote to the hatreds that create ideologically motivated violence. However, the poem is not judgmental, acknowledging that our very presence in the world is a source of harm. The poem ends on the word irredeemable. In other words, that which is lost cannot be retrieved. The word also has a specific religious connotation. In the Christian tradition, Jesus is often referred to as redeemer because he saved mankind from sin. Burnside is aware of these resonances and his use of this word to close the poem is entirely fitting. It suggests that nothing described in the poem, natural or human, can ultimately be saved from history or time. But paying attention to the moment, as the poem does so beautifully, may at least bring us a deeper association or rather a deeper appreciation of all this gazed upon and cherished world. The poem enactes themes through both structure and language. The first 22 lines are fractured intent on recording sense impressions, details caught and recorded. The main verb is knelt, an action charged with spiritual meaning set in opposition to the threat of the warplanes. The structure of the poem then shifts. The stanza is becoming intermittently more regular as observational detail turns to thought and an attempt to make some kind of sense out of what is happening in the world. The poem is balanced between a number of opposing concepts which Burnside explores through complex strands of imagery. The setting of the beach is significant, poised between land and sea. Other opposites held in tension in the poem include the human and natural world, innocence versus guilt, pessimism versus hope, the earth, sea and air, freedom and captivity. Along with the line in stanza structure, these give the poem its sense of ebb and flow. When you're considering other poems in the collection to compare it to, consider Robert Mahinix, the fox in the National Museum of Worlds, which is a similarly expansive poem touching on some of the same themes. The contrast and tone could hardly be greater though, so these poems form an interesting pair to consider together, especially when thinking about which elements to combine to create the poet's distinctive voice. Another poem that follows in this anthology is The War Correspondent by Kieran Carson. Carson is from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and he's the son of Liam Carson, who's a postman. He acquired his tastes for language and storytelling very early, and he recalls when he was two or three, his father would tell his children stories in Gaelic every evening, and each story would continue at least, it seemed that way for weeks. Carson was educated at Queen's University in Belfast, from which he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English, and from 1974 to 75 he worked as a schoolteacher in Belfast, after which he became the traditional arts officer for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. His first volume of poetry was The New Estate, and also what we'll find in a lot of his poetry is that he uses humour and satire in his work, and a lot of also his work reflects his Catholic upbringing, as well as the violent situation in Belfast, which includes the conflict between the Protestants and the Catholics. Longer lines of his earlier work, which are influenced by the American poet C.K. Williams, have gradually evolved, however, into a spurious style through wordplay and an intense focus on language and form. His work has won many prizes, and also he's published several novels and memoirs and translations. Now when it comes to the poem itself, The War Correspondent, it actually consists of seven poems, all but one of which are set in the Crimea at the time of the Crimean War. This war took place between 1854 and 1856 and pitted a British and French alliance against Russia for the influence in the Near East. Gallipoli and Balaclava, two of the poems from the sequence, are named after two particularly infamous battles. Gallipoli is the one poem in the sequence not set during the Crimean War, but the First World War. It's about the Dana Delz campaign of 1915 to 1916, a bar word for military disaster, in which the Allied forces, Britain, the British Empire forces in France, attempted to secure Constantinople, which is modern-day Istanbul from the Turks. The six-month campaign produced appalling casualties, almost half a million dead or wounded. Balaclava recalls a famous incident in the Crimean War known as a charge of the Light Brigade. Due to a misunderstanding during this incident, a British cavalry charge was sent up a valley strongly held on three sides by the Russians. About 250 men were killed or wounded and over 400 horses lost for no military purpose. The British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson immortalised this battle in the charge of the Light Brigade, which is a poem. But juxtaposing two different conflicts 60 years apart, Carson makes a point about the world's ongoing addiction to war. The fact that in the First World War the great powers aligned themselves differently with Russia now allied to Britain and France against the Turks and Germany underlines the pointlessness of the earlier sacrifice. In Gallipoli, Carson presents a narrator trying to capture an impression of a place teeming with people and also chaotic in its environment. The crowdedness of the scene is enacted by the densely packed lines and stanzas which are full of rich sensory detail conveying an overwhelming physicality. The places are melting pot of races of conflicting cultures and languages. The ethnic origins which Carson lists a roll call of European anonymity over the past few years are a reminder of the ever-present threat of war. England and Ireland, Britain and France, Turks, Arabs and Armenians, Turks and Greeks, Muslims and Christians. The poem is also full of references to human activity of buying and selling, farming, trade, markets, factories, the arms industry, mining, drugs, sex all reflect a world where everything is up for grabs not least by the different empires whose rivalries were a key catalyst for the First World War. No wonder that in the last sign the narrator acknowledges that he's still at a loss to describe Gallipoli. Balaklava returns to the earlier conflict in Crimea and describes in advance by Turkish and French troops this time fighting on the same side. The living soldiers march over the ground where the charge of the library gate took place and the narrator describes in graphic detail the state of the graves of the dead English cavalrymen. The contrast between the living and the dead expressed vividly through the description of the uniforms under the hot sun. The gorgeousness of the Turkish and French uniforms versus the decay and degradation of the dead soldiers. However, the poem also suggests how quickly the living may turn into the dead. The scarlet trousers of the French cavalry are the same colour as the tatters of his slaughtered English counterpart. The point is underlined by the chilling details of the missing boots and buttons. The dead have been plundered by the living whose lives may soon be lost. The other key strand of imagery in the poem is connected to the beauty of the meadow flowers. The soldiers in the colourful uniforms are like a bed of flowers but they are a destructive presence crushing the meadow as they march. The landscape has already been polluted by warfare and the poem presents another tide of war sweeping inexorably over this contested landscape. Other poems you can compare this to is John Burnside's poem History which is also shadowed by war. Taken together, the poems form an interesting dialogue about the nature of war, both historical and contemporary. They're also concerned with evoking a sense of place using contrasting techniques to do so. The next poem in this collection is An Easy Passage by Julia Copus. So Julia Copus grew up in London in the house with three brothers who were learning to play musical instruments. Two of them later went on to be professional musicians and Copus said in an interview that in order to have quiet in her room of her own, she gave up her own trumpet lessons and moved into a caravan in the driveway while she was doing her exam. She says, Her poems are often subtly and elaborately structured when you consider them and one of her achievements being the creation of new form in the spectacular or mirror poem in which the second stanza repeats exactly the lines of the first only in reverse. Her most recent collection contains a moving sequence ghost which is the experience of IVF treatment and she's an award-winning poet who's been shortlisted for several prizes included here. Now when it comes to the poem itself, in the first line of this delicate poem Copus uses the word halfway describe the position of a girl as she prepares to surreptitiously clam back inside her own house while her friend waits in the driveway below. This one word is suggestive of the poem's central concern its exploration with that fleeting period between girlhood and womanhood. This poem of balance and poise contrasts or rather aligns with a girl's physical situation between up and down indoors and outdoors symbolizing her stage in life. Throughout the poem Copus uses opposites to create a sense of things being on the cusp, sun is contrasted with shade, the freedom of young girls with the adult world of work while the girl is described as being half in love with her friend. The use of tenses also informs the poem's structure it's written in the past tense but the reference to astrology and the presence of the older secretary as well as the mention of the girl's mother are reminders of what the future might hold in store. The sense of balance is further informed by the single question which comes almost exactly halfway through the poem in which the narrator for the only time comments directly on the action. While the narrator remains unobtrusive for most of the poem her point of view is important the scene is viewed through her eyes as if through a movie camera zooming in for close-ups on different characters and allowing us brief glimpses into their lives. While the tone is broadly conversational the longish and jammed lines providing a naturally easy flow there are subtle patterns of imagery which help bind the poem together. In particular references to light and colour in describing the girl's help to convey both the delicate physical presence and the fragility of this particular moment in time. Other poems you can compare it to in the collection are Helen Dunmore's to my nine-year-old self Leonidas Flynn the furthest distances of travelled explore similar territory in looking back at youth from an older perspective they form an interesting contrast to the Copas poem though as they both employ a more obviously personal voice in comparison to Copas's tender detachment. Deliverer by Tishani Doshi is another poem in this collection and the poet, writer and dancer Tishani Doshi was born in the city formally known as Madras India to Wests, Welsh and Gujarati parents. She earned a BA from Queens College in North Carolina and an MA from the writing seminars department at John Hopkins University. And after working in the fashion magazine industry in London Doshi returned to India. An unexpected meeting with one of India's dancers leading choreographers led Doshi to a career in dance and as well as performing as a dancer all over the world she's a freelance journalist and has published five books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry and she currently lives on the beach between two fishing villages in Tamil Nadu with her husband and three dogs. Now when it comes to the poem itself the Deliverer, this uncompromising short sequence lays bare in the starkest language the infanticide of girl babies in India. While the language used is bored in the extreme a troubling psychological depth is added by the complex relationships in the poem between the narrator her mother, a foster child and the baby's new parents in America. These unspoken relationships call into question the nature of family bonds take the word sister in the first line for instance which refers to a nun but hints at a lost relationship between the narrator and the foster baby the use of the short sequence form enables the poet to explore the situation from different perspectives it perhaps also suggests in a shifts from time and place both the invisible global connections which link east and west the developed and developing world and the fracturing of family relationships the lack of figurative or descriptive language combines or contributes to a flatness of tone expressive of the bleakness of the situation single syllable verbs thud through the lines with a brutal emphasis on the physical the potential of new life is reduced to something less than a body to wood, bone and garbage the one outburst of emotion we couldn't stop crying takes place in America back in India the women who feel for penis or know penis cannot afford to confront their experience the language returns to a kind of numbness as they go through the terrible motions of sex and birth grim though the events described are the poem does not lay easy blame the women who display such apparent heartlessness towards the girl babies are seen in the final part to be at the mercy of a society which privileges male children we see them as victims too even the men they lie down for the poem hints are trapped by cultural and economic pressures when you're considering other poems in the collection to compare it to in its complex exploration of guilt and its use of stripped down language Roderick Ford's Giuseppe is close in spirit to Doshi's poem the next poem in this collection is the Map Woman by Caroline Duffy now when it comes to the poet herself Caroline Duffy became the UK's first female poet laureate her poetry is both popular and critically acclaimed and she's one of the most influential poets of recent decades a prolific writer she's published eight poetry collections as well as plays in children's poetry and she's edited several anthologies she was born in Glasgow in 1955 to a Scottish father and an Irish mother where as Catholic she grew up in Staffordshire an ardent reader and an elder sister to four brothers Duffy's mother would invent fairy tales for her a form whose archetypes she's always found seductive encouraged to write from the age of 10 by an inspirational teacher at the common school that she went to Duffy went on to study philosophy at Liverpool University graduating in 1977 and she's won an array of prizes so when it comes to Duffy's own poetry it's quite accessible and subtle using conversational and colloquial language to great effect she's a brilliant creator of voices often using dramatic monologues to explore her themes these include subverting female archetypes and challenging stereotypical gender roles an empathy with the social outsider and the politics of language and following the birth of her daughter Ella in 1995 motherhood Duffy's poetry can be witty and toughly humorous but also capable of lyrical beauty and great tenderness she's also highly versatile writing in a range of traditional forms such as a sonnet for her book Rapture so now I want to come to the poem itself The Map Woman the power of this poem partly lies in its combination of an impossible premise with detailed realism the underlying metaphor that we are indelibly marked by our own past by our origins is made literal by Duffy to disquieting effect throughout the poem physical details pile up bringing the woman's predicament vividly to life layers of imagery mirror the woman's different levels of self working inwards through the course of the poem it begins with clothing which tries to hide the map moves on to her skin and an exploration of geography and location beneath the skin with the disturbing image which turns the woman's body into earth tunneled and borrowed by the past the relief of her new blank skin is short lived suggesting that the idea of starting again is an illusion because we carry our past inside us cultural references such as the Beatles and the picture house locate the past Duffy so effectively captures to the both swore era of the 50s and 60s she creates a kind of English every town from that period with its motorways and sensible shops and its strict social hierarchies mayors, councillors, teachers the poet uses geography to explore the social tensions and social expectations and assumptions at the time neatly summarised by the list of English heroes after whom the more affluent streets are named the poem hints that it's a society that's against which the woman chafed the images of boundaries the river the motorway the trees pining for big cities all suggest the series of constraint that the woman fills within the poem the whole poem has a restlessness to which reflects the woman's attempts to escape her past the prevalence of list gives the poems a galloping tempo as does the predominantly an apistic rhythm the poem's sense of barely contained energy is also conveyed through Duffy's extensive use of irregular rhyme and half rhyme it's perhaps significant then that the poem ends in an almost couplet of bone and home a sense of closure which, combined with the imagery suggests the inescapable nature of the past other poems to compare it to stylistically is Simon Armitage's Chainsaw vs a Pampers Grass which has interesting similarities with Duffy's poem and it can prompt an interesting discussion around how social expectations are experienced differently by men and women effects by Alan Jenkins provides a contrast and technique exploring the same territory in a more realistic way The Larmus Hurling by Ian Duhigg is the next poem in this collection Sir Duhigg is the 8th of 11 children born in London to Irish parents with a liking for poetry he worked for 15 years with homeless people and has subsequently held fellowships at Lancaster Leeds Durham and Newcastle universities and he first came to promise in 1987 when his poem 1919 won the national poetry competition a feat he repeated with the Larmus Hurling in 2000 and in 1994 he was named as one of poetry society's new generation of poets Duhigg is particularly known for his inventive use of language and wide-reinding knowledge of world literatures, culture and history this gives his poem incredible diversity and range he often uses traditional forms but in an unexpected way while subversive with and irreverence is a hallmark of much of his work he's also written libretti, music adaptations and a stage play written by various other authors too and he currently lives in Leeds so when it comes to the poem itself it's considered a contemporary classic and the title of the poem is also the title of Duhigg's fourth collection which won the national poetry competition in 2000 while the poem has a number of illusions and dialect words which require glossing the best way to approach it is probably not to worry exactly what everything means but to listen to the sound the poem makes and the atmosphere it creates there's enough in the poem to provide a basic narrative before moving on to think about what is exactly going on and how this might be interpreted intentional ambiguity is one of the key features of this poem so it's a good example to discuss when demonstrating that a poem is a code that can be broken to easily provide a single one-dimensional meaning one way to interpret this is that this poem is a dramatic monologue telling the story of how the narrator a farmer came to hire a young man to help him with his cows the title and the action of hiring a labourer at a fair takes us back to a rural world that dates back at least a hundred years if not longer it has echoes of a Thomas Hardy novel and this archaic quality continues as the poem progresses the new hired hand proves uncannily good with the cattle the poem states yields doubled and the cows only give birth to more valuable heifers in his affinity with the beasts he tends the hiling has almost a magical quality all seems well until the ominous quote then one night at the end of the first stanza the break generates tension as we look to see what happens next suddenly the narrator reveals that he is a widow he dreams of his wife wakes and goes to see the hireling in a nightmarish scene the boy suddenly appears like a figure from witchcraft naked with the fox trap on his ankle as if interrupted in the middle of a dark fright the narrator knew him a warlock that is a male equivalent of a witch horrified the narrator shoots him through the heart by the light of the moon he watches the body of the hireling transform itself into a hare one of the most magical creatures in British folklore his body grows lighter as the narrator takes him in a sack and dumps him in the river since the murder the narrator's luck has run out his cattle are cursed and he's haunted by guilt he passes this time using the metal from coins to create a shot for his gun and in confessing his sins in all likelihood to catholic priest well this summarises what happens the poem the motivations and the narrator his exact relationship with the hireling and his relative guilt or innocence are all deeply ambiguous the ending with its direct plea bless me father puts us in the role of the priest but how are we to judge him when he isn't telling us a full story in catholic tradition to be absolved of your sins your confession needs to be full and made with a firm purpose of amendment the narrator's confession is only partial and maybe that's the reason that it has only been an hour since his last confession he feels compelled to repeat his story again and again we question what is it the narrator isn't telling us perhaps he was sexually attracted to the hireling the image of a cow with leather horns as well as being an old description for a hare combines the male and the female as does the strange image of the narrator tracking down his wife's torn voice to the hireling's pale form is it the hireling's company he's so fond of especially as he knew when to shut up does the narrator desire for the hireling surface in the world lovely what when it comes to it happened to the wife was she really as dear to the narrator as were led to believe and is the narrator sound in mind or has his subconscious disturbed by his feelings conjured up a demonic image of the hireling this is all left very ambiguous and we as readers are left to contemplate the answers to this ourselves the poem deals with transgression exploring the boundary between the real and the supernatural the animal and the human male and female, guilt and innocence life and death, waking and sleeping sanity and madness the narrator uses the word disturbed the second stanza and it's certainly the case that the poem itself has a disturbing power the unreliability of its narrator drawing us back again and again as is in the best ghost stories to try and work out what actually happened the shifts and mood are brilliantly underpinned by the sound and imagery of the poem transformation and transgression taking place at the level of the individual words trace for instant the word light through the poem how it starts out as an expression of a chair before becoming the light from the dark lantern by which she sees his vision of the naked hireling before re-emerging as a queasy yellow light of the moon which is witness to the murder and then finally transforming back to a reference to weight the time associated with the hireling's dead body similarly the literal perhaps proverbial heaviness of the narrator's person of her stanza has by the end become the weight of guilt and endless confession so the vowel sounds in the poem and how they chime and shift as the poem progresses the long eye of light for instance or the dance between the pronouns I and him which enact the central relationship of the poem that end in such violence add an alliterational other sound echoes and you have an incredibly densely woven poem which nevertheless manages to retain its impression of a voice talking to us when you're considering other poems to compare this poem to there's several from the collection which also use a dramatic first-person narrator we have patients of Babby's poem to Shani's Doshi's poem and Roderick Ford's poems in particular consider the similarities and differences of approach in using this technique which can be quite a useful exercise the next poem in this collection is to my nine-year-old self by Helen Dunmore now when it comes to Dunmore herself she's an acclaimed poet and best-selling novelist whose work in both genres has won much praise and popularity born in Yorkshire she's the second of four children and with a large extended family Dunmore grew up surrounded by stories, fairy tales ballads and early grounding that would be very influential in her writing Dunmore has also become a very acclaimed literary figure winning many prizes her writing in both prose and poetry is known for its lyrical intensity which can be both delicate and piercing but it also engages sensual and exact recreating scenes for the reader that lodge in your mind many of her poems have the mysterious compressed quality of a short story her writing demonstrates more public concerns too in particular threats to the natural environment and a fascination for history as many of her novels are also set in the past now when it comes to the poem it's off to my nine-year-old self by using the form of a dialogue with her childhood self Dunmore brings the process of growing older sharp relief she addresses directly the young girl she once was and although her younger self doesn't speak it is her physical presence which makes the most vivid impression on the reader her vitality and spontaneity are conveyed in a wealth of sensory detail more than anything the girl lives through her body a string of active verbs demonstrating her energy and confidence this contrast with Dunmore's characterization of her old self and the physical frailties she's now subject to this physical contrast between the two is symbolic of the deeper attitudinal changes that Dunmore or the narrator have undergone the girl's thinking or rather the girl's unthinking eagerness has been replaced by a more fearful pessimistic frame of mind which Dunmore is concerned will cloud the young girl's summer morning however the poem ends with a brilliant image of absorption in the world of the body and cessation which suggests that even if this imagined internal dialogue could take place the child would not be able to understand the adult's perspective the shifting pronouns in the poem chart the sense of division between the child and the adult she will become the unifying we keeps breaking down into iron new culminating the statement in the last stanza I'll leave you it's impossible the poem's ending suggests for the two realities to coexist time inevitably cuts us off from our younger selves even when as in Dunmore's case we can recreate the past briefly poignantly through language other poems to compare this to in the anthology and which most obviously connected Dunmore's are Julius Copus's uneasy passage also looking at Burnside's evocation of childhood in history could be interesting as both writers use sensory impression to recreate the child's option in the physical world the next poem in this anthology is a minor role by UA Fanthorpe UA Fanthorpe's death in 2009 was felt as a genuine loss by many of the fans of her clear-eyed humane prose including Caroline Duffy who described her as an official deeply loved laureate Fanthorpe spent her earliest years in Kent she attended St. Anne's College Oxford afterwards becoming a teacher and head of English at Cheltenham's Ladies College however she only began writing when she turned her back on teaching to become a receptionist at a psychiatric hospital where her observation of the strange specialness of patients provided the inspiration for her first book called Side Effects following her relatively late start in literature Fanthorpe was prolific producing nine full-length collections including the forward prize-nominated Safer's Houses and the Poetry Book Society Recommendation Consequences and she was awarded a CBE in 2001 Talking of her wartime childhood Fanthorpe said I think it's important not to run away and on the surface her poetry seems to encapsulate those traditional stoic English values we associate with that period certainly England and Englishness are central themes in her work but such a reading misses the wit and slider bunking of national myth which mark Fanthorpe's responsibility now when it comes to the poem itself at the core of this moving poem is a concern about how we speak truthfully in the face of life's most difficult moments the metaphor of the stage and the narrator's minor role within a play is used to explore ideas of social pretense in the face of serious illness the narrator carries on acting Fanthorpe establishes a dual perspective not only is the narrator an actor but she's also a member of the audience watching as the action unfolds Observed is a key word in the first line implying distance and a sense of perspective a stance the narrator retains up until the last line the poem though analysing the narrator's reluctance to acknowledge her illness head on suggests a wider refusal in society to look dying in death in the eye these concerns are enacted through Fanthorpe's use of direct speech in the poem alongside references to socially appropriate forms of language for much of the poem the narrator and the people around her deal in euphemism and false cheerfulness whilst these conventional exchanges help keep the monstrous fabric of daily life intact they fail to communicate her predicament truthfully there is an ambivalence in the poem which is not entirely dismissive of the background music of civility but in the end speaking personally and directly wins out in the power of that final line set in its own to emphasise the importance and urgency of its message the tension between truth telling and evasion is also present in Fanthorpe's use of verbs much of the poem is written in the imperative for example it states cancel things tidy things pretend all as well the effect is of someone giving themselves a talking to trying to keep a lid on emotion the other predominant feature is Fanthorpe's use of the ING form the suffix ING for verbs particularly in the second and third stanzas which captures the endless awful processes of being seriously ill allowing no time for pause or reflection now it comes to linking this poem to other poems in anthology consider poems which talk about how to speak truthfully in the face of societal pressure which is also a key theme of Adam Thorpe's moving poem about his mother on blindness while Kieran O'Driscoll's poem Please Hold although very different in tone is also concerned with empty forms of language the next poem in this anthology is The Gun by Vicky Fever Vicky Fever grew up in Nottingham in the house of quarrelling women and emotional inheritance which later finds expression in her poetry her dark and sensual reworkings of myth and fairy tale have been termed domestic Gothic by fellow poet Matthew Sweeney while her poems incorporate objects from everyday life Fever often graphs them onto the transgressive power of these old tales allowing her a space to explore emotions and desires which women are not usually allowed or don't allow themselves to express a certain concern of her work is female creativity and its repression and how this can find an outlet in violence now when it comes to the poem itself The Gun the poem's audacious relish of the physical acknowledges the thrill of connection between sex death and life the opening stanza is dramatic shocking even a line literal and metaphorical has been crossed the house is traditionally associated with life and family a place where we feel safe what enters into this sanctuary is a potential threat however a means of taking life the atmosphere of violence is sustained throughout the poem particularly in the sound and the structure of the lines and stanzas in the second stanza for instance short lines and disruptive line breaks combine with hard, continental sounds to give an angular edgy feel to the description of the gun it's as if the gun's explosive potential is embedded in the sound the poem makes on Jean Beaumont the running on of units of sense over two or more lines also has the effective effect of shining a small spotlight on those words at the end of the start the gun is full of such examples for instance a rabbit shot clean through the head or your hands reek of gun oil and entrails you trample fur and feathers in this way the line breaks enact the violent encounter between the human and animal worlds the poem also breaks contemporary literal taboos around hunting and the valuing of the natural world as well as gender roles seen as complicit in the gun's use but in a traditional female role cooking what the man has brought her by exploring the primitive thrill of hunting and its connection to our most basic instincts fever prepares the ground for the extraordinary last stanza at this point we move into a world of ancient rites and pagan beliefs with the appearance of the king of death the poem's contention that death brings life more starkly into focus is beautifully expressed in the last image of the king's mouth sprouting golden crocuses other poems you can connect this poem to is patience at bagby's eat me which forms an interesting counterpoint to fever's poem it's also about appetite but the gender roles play out differently though the poems share a highly sensual approach to language the next poem in this collection is the furthest instances of travelled by Leonita Flynn so Flynn is one of the most acclaimed poets in a new generation of northern Irish writers her three collections to date have all won critical plaudits and this obviously reveals how hard hitting her writing is her work is also known for its quick silver wit and irreverence while a sophisticated writer steeped in literary traditions from Chaucer to Wordsworth to contemporary poets her poems wear the learning likely even when dealing with darker subjects such as her father's Alzheimer's she has also written articles, reviews and essays and is currently a writer in residence at the Bloomsbury hotel in London now when it comes to her poem journeys physical and emotional are at the heart of this lovely roof or poem about growing up it charts the shift from the freedom of a student traveller to the more mature perspective of the present day narrator in doing so it acknowledges that our emotional geography is as significant to who we are as the fidget school journeys we undertake part of the poems appeal lies in its honesty the narrator's younger self thinks that she has the answer stating this is how to live at the end of the poem she's still on the move though this time the distance is travelled are through the lives of others the narrator offers no conclusion about the best way to live life remains provisional unsettled while once this lack of stability represented freedom and adventure now there's a sadness that things do constantly change as well as a nostalgia for the lost exhilaration of life on the open road the names of remote places can jaw up this lost excitement but now moving on means leaving people behind these memories might be throw away but they're also souvenirs and valentines the poems exploration of nature of freedom is reflected in Flynn's use of the rhyming couplet however instead of full rhyme she often uses half rhyme the line lengths do differ wildly in the most extreme example a word is split over two lines to clinch the rhyme it's as if the poem is kicking against its own constraints and this is partly what gives the poem its sense of over or free wheeling energy the tone only shifts in the final stanza when the couplets finally settle into full rhyme with lines of similar length other poems to convert parrot to for instance for a different treatment on aging and the shifts in perspective it brings is Sue Boyle's A Leisure Centre is also a temple of learning which makes for interesting comparison the next poem is Giuseppe by Roderick Ford so born in Swansea Ford has lived a nomadic life experiencing many different cultures which have informed his work he was taken to Australia as an infant then when he was eight his parents moved to England growing up in the 60s he embraced the counterculture of the time living and working around the world including West Africa and the Persian Gulf after spending most of the 1980s in Bristol he moved to Paris which marked a shift away from experimental prose works which have been his creative focus to a life dedicated to reading, studying and using poetry using Paris as a base he traveled to Europe and lived for long periods in Amsterdam, Venice, Stockholm and Savazzo a wooded island on the Baltic and these engagements of different cultures have informed and deepened his poetry he currently lives in Dublin and he's won a range of prizes which are outlined here now when it comes to the poem it's Giuseppe this is a really disturbing poem which blends historical realism with the fairy tale element to explore the darkest corners of human behaviour the airy effect of the poem is partly achieved through the contrast between what happens and the tone in which it's described the language is deliberately flat and factual, concentrating on actions without comments even a word like butchered which we might expect to carry a moral judgement is revealed as being an accurate description of the mermaid's dismemberment figurative language is almost entirely absent there are only two adjectives golden and large and one simile but she screamed like a woman in terrible fear this one simile has tremendous power however going to the heart of the poem which is what makes us human the pressure of war we question whether there's any innate moral compass that can keep us on the right side of horror in this context the mermaid can be said to be symbolic of any outsider or enemy but making her a creature from legend Ford allows us to look more clearly at the protagonist's behaviour their strategy is to deny her any humanity the talk of proof using her physical difference and supposed mental incapacity as an excuse for what they do in this they recall the arguments set forth by the Nazi regime and other totalitarian authorities throughout history bent on establishing racial superiority however the poem undermines the key arguments at key points and demonstrates the perpetrators lying to themselves the doctor won't eat the raw offered to him most disturbing is the revelation that she was married that she crossed into the human world of love and might have expected protection from no one can quite bring themselves to remove her wedding ring despite the desecration of her body what the poem demonstrates is a lasting effect of atrocity on a community for this is an event in which the entire village is implicated while the violence carried out by key members of the community most disturbing perhaps the doctor no one else including the narrator's uncle tried to intervene this collective guilt the poem implies is seeping into the next generation we can sense it in the compulsion of the narrator to tell his uncle's story and the inability to look each other in the eye the poem ends on the word god reminding us of how far the protagonists have moved outside moral boundaries in its deliberateness and its deliberate flatness of tone in dealing with atrocity when you're considering which other poems to link it to this poem is quite similar to the strategy used by Tissani Doshi in her sequence the deliverer while the ambiguity the narrator could also be interestingly compared with the narrator of Dew Higgs the lumbus heroine the next poem to consider is out of the bag by Seamus Heaney So Heaney rose from humble beginnings as a country dairy farm boy to become one of the giants of the 20th century poetry he's the one winner of the noble priors for literature in 1995 and his work is known and loved around the world his poetry is informed by his wide learning and knowledge of literature but never overwhelmed by it rather he roots his work in the specific, alert to the miracles of ordinary beginnings allied to a rich music of consonant and rhythm influenced by cadences of his northern Irish accent these qualities mean his poetry appeals as much to reader and the heart as to the mind it's perhaps these aspects of his work which have made him a genuinely popular poet one of the few that people beyond poetry world have heard of the contentious history of Northern Ireland and this eruption into the Troubles has also influenced Heaney's work that he refused a simple stance of pro-Republican propaganda his poetry insisting on the complex realities of the situation this refuser to become a cheerleader for the Catholic cause drew criticism from some quarters of the time and partly prompted his later move over the border to the Republic of Ireland gradually however the integrity of his vision culminating in his noble citation which praised his work for its little core beauty and ethical death Heaney died in 2013 now when it comes to the poem itself in this sequence Heaney blends personal memory with his deep knowledge of the classical world of ancient Greece to interrogate myths of origin the poem itself acts like a bag its content slowly revealed to the poet the movement of the poem a household to the Catholic Shrinet lords to the Greek archaeological site at Epidorus and then back to the room where his mother gave birth gives it a sense of closure the poem travels demonstrate how far the poet has come from his start in life and how important the start remains in his psyche and poetic practice through its different registers of language and imagery the poem also explores ideas of class, faith and gender central to these concerns is the remarkable figure of Dr. Curlin he's part of Heaney's childhood mythology in which each new baby in his family was wrought by the doctor in his bag it's the story that the adults collude in and the children believe it turns the doctor already their superior in terms of wealth, education and social status into something approaching a god he's treated with reverence each visit accompanied by time honoured rituals the first poem ends with Heaney's childhood self-imagining a glimpse into the realm where the doctor lives a frightening place which demonstrates his power over life and death in the second and third poems Heaney's later perspective as a highly educated poet takes over he self-consciously displays his classical learning by going back to the origins of medicine and the cult of the Greek god of healing Askolipios however, despite his knowledge Heaney also presents himself as essentially powerless at Lord's he was merely the priest's helper at the catholic service nearly fainting in the heat a reaction he suffers from again as he bends to pick some grass from the grounds of the Greek temple all he can do in the face of the illness of friends is to send them tokens from the gods sight and lie down hoping his goddess daughter will appear by contrast the vision of Dr. Curlin again full of decisive energy and a god-like power the phrase Poeta Doctis reveals some of the ambivalence in the poem while Heaney has achieved the status of a poet who is also versed in classical learning the phrase also leads us to question the power poetry in the face of suffering we question whether poetry can affect any kind of kill or if it's just another form of superstition a matter of faith in the final poem Heaney is once again the passive observer allowed into the inner shrine of his mother's bedroom movingly the mystery Heaney reveals at the heart is of given life is not a goddess but his mother the poem acknowledges his mother's power but the poignancy lies in the fact that she doesn't feel able to claim the triumph of giving birth for herself the social constraints of the time the taboo talk against talking about the female body the deference of the working class to the educated class mean she doesn't take any credit her voice at the end with its sweet colloquial tone contrasts with Heaney's erudition and acts as a final dramatisation of the tensions which run throughout the poem other poems you can compare it to is Ruth Padel's You, Shiva and My Mum which looks at motherhood, faith and culture the other poem to compare is Effects by Alan Jenkins now Jenkins was born in Surrey in 1955 and brought up in London where he has lived for most of his life he has a large body of work which spans his works beginning with his poetry collections in 1988 all the way through to 2015 and also his award in 2006 Jenkins has said that one of his poetic elders and betters once told him your subject has lost stay with that and the treatment of loss appears with a significant theme throughout his work in earlier collections the loss was focused on love particularly the painful central sequence of this book harm about the aftermath of a love affair later workers included many allergies for friends and parents known for their confessional tone Jenkins's poems are also formally brilliant his scrupulous structures and sharp wit helping to shape the intense emotions he lays bare now when it comes to the poem itself the first action of the poem the narrator holding his dead mother's hand releases a flood of memory a rich poignant vein of recollection that recreates a life from which has just come to an end the poem's syntax is central to its impact written on one long block of text containing only two sentences it suggests an unstoppable flow of thought and feeling the poem unfolds through a complex structure of clauses and sub clauses each new detail the narrator notices about his mother's hand triggers further memories the life remembered though or rather through the hand is typical of the mother's class and era it's conservative of the small sea limited in terms of education and experience a life lived at a time when foreign holidays were beyond the reach of ordinary people food meant plain English dish dishes and a woman's place was in the home by contrast the narrator or her son is educated and this has opened up a physical and emotional distance between him and his mother that her death has now made painfully permanent the poem's power lies partly in the narrator's sense of regret for the judgmental attitude of his younger self impatient with the limitations of his parents and background too late he's come to understand that his antipathy towards her reflects a lack of compassion it's only now she's dead that he finally holds her hand when it can no longer provide any comfort the closing image of the small bag of effects is a touching indication of how little she has to leave behind the poem is tightly but irregularly rhymed with some rhymes occurring as much as 14 lines apart while couplets are also scattered throughout the poem this oscillation between closeness and distance mirrors the nature of the central relationship the pattern changes towards the end of the poem with the rhymes becoming denser and more frequent until we reach the three rhymed lines at the end in this shift it's possible to discern perhaps the narrator's growing sense of the reality and finality of his mother's death other poems to compare it to are complexities of class and inheritance which are explored in Ross Barber's material which also focuses the narrator's relationship with her mother hands are also the central image of Shanaid Morrissey's genetics a poem very different in tone and form the next poem in this anthology is the National Museum of Oils by Robert Mihinnick so he's described as the leading Welsh poet of his generation and he's a novelist, essayist and leading environmentalist his passion and concern for the environment runs through much of his literary output his book Watching the Fire Eater combines environmental and literary interests and it was named Welsh Book of the Year in 1993 a feat which he repeated in 2006 with To Babel and Back which among other things researched the use of depleted uranium in modern weapons following a deadly trail from the uranium mines of the USA to Saddam Hussein Iraq the recent Iraq wars also feature in his poetry with his poem 25 laments for Iraq winning the Ford Prize for the best single poem and the expletical and environmental concerns married in his poetry to lyrical narrative dense with imagery Robert Mihinnick lives in South Wales and his debut novel See Holly was published in 2007 and shortlisted for the 2008 Prize now when it comes to the poem itself in his tour de force of a poem the poet creates in the figure of the fox an ambiguous guide to the culture housed in the museum on the one hand he's a vivid presence the essence of the living animal the verbs used to describe him convey his physical energy he doesn't stop, he skidaddles shimmies and trots however the fox also has a symbolic quality to him drawing on his place in folk lore this element is less benign recalling to mind the fox's cruelty and cunning as a predator that the narrator sees him as a threat is clear from his pursuit through the museum and his repeated cry the fox is in the flock this is underlined by the image of the fox as the narrator chases the fox through the poem we're taken on a whistle stop tour of human history while the title refers to the National Museum of Wales the cultures represented in it range across the world from the dynasties of China to India to the ancient civilization of the Sumerians now part of modern day Iraq to Wales' own distant Celtic and more recent industrial past in doing so the poem suggests perhaps that a single nationality never exists in isolation but is always connected in complex ways to the wider world a similar point is made by the range of disciplines represented there's art which is modern and contemporary archaeology, industrial and social history science and natural history the full range of human endeavour so what are we to make of the threat that the fox poses one possible interpretation is that the fox as the poem itself states at one point is the future and why the narrator can never catch up with him if that's the case we can question what kind of future might the fox represent the last line of the poem suggests a dark conclusion iron doors closing in on human history this undertow of darkness is born out in images of extinction those once powerful civilizations mentioned in the poem are long gone instead as a proverbial dodo referenced in stanza 5 in addition there are hints of the kind of environmental trouble we're storing up for ourselves the use of oil drum and bubble wrap to describe specimens in the natural history section the reference to a plant now extinct in the wild and the beautiful metaphor horn filled sigh to describe the effects of engineering all these suggest a future where the very idea of civilization may be threatened undermining the title's pride in the concept of a national museum the overall effect of this poem however is far from downbeat the sheer vitality of the fox and the language used to describe him defies the logic of the poem's conclusion the heavy use of alliteration in particular gives the poem a driving momentum we may be approaching the end game rapidly but there's still the sheer pleasure of the sound and movement to enjoy on the way this ambiguity is expressed in the contents of the museum itself which epitomize both humanity's destructive and creative impulses now when it comes to comparing other poems with this poem we should consider how national is treated a rather national identity is treated irreverently in Daljeet Nagra's Look We Have Come Into Dover as whilst the two poems share a kind of manic energy in the sound they make they are quite different another poem to consider as well is the wall correspondent by Kieran Carson which makes for an interesting comparison the poems are ambitious in their attempts to use a huge sweep of human history to hint at contemporary issues the next poem is genetics by Sinead Morrissey Morrissey grew up in Belfast Northern Ireland and was made the city's inaugural poet laureate in 2013 she was educated at Trinity College Dublin and she's travelled quite widely and lived in Japan and New Zealand experiences that have left a mark on her early poetry her work is quite wide-ranging in its subject matters however her poems are beautifully controlled with literary sophistication which does not preclude tenderness her poems encompass historical imaginings and domestic scenes and are appreciative of worldwide cultures while always being firmly rooted in Northern Ireland now when it comes to the poem itself Morrissey's choice of the Villanelle expresses beautifully the dance of separation togetherness which runs through the poem requires two repeated lines which alternate at the end of each stanza and the whole poem is constructed from only two rhymes the parents' relationship with each other and the child is beautifully expressed by the structure form and meaning in the poem becoming one the interlacing of words and rhymes suggests the complex inheritance of genetics is revealed in the narrator's hands the Villanelle is also a circular form coming back in the final couplet to where it began it forms a ring echoing the imagery of marriage in the poem however Morrissey's use of the form is even more subtle just as genetics don't result in a carbon copy of the previous generation so the rhymes and repetitions in the poem aren't exact the key rhyme out of which the rest of the poem grows is palms hands a half not full rhyme the words echo each other as do the words mother and father they touch both meaning and in sound but they are not the same the narrator has inherited physical likeness combined to create a new individual identity the fact that the parents are no longer together makes the presence in the narrator's body all the more literally touching the Christian marriage ceremony speaks of the couple becoming one flesh how the narrator's hands now are all that are left of that commitment to each other the last stanza introduces another relationship to the poem a you is suddenly addressed as the narrator looks to her own future and the possibility of having a family of her own so while the poem does return to its start it also makes a fresh chapter continuity and change are again brought together poems to link this to are inheritance by even Boland which is a very obvious poem to look at alongside genetics in the subject matter while George Sertz's song also demonstrates the musical power of highly patterned poetry and how small modulations can carry the meaning of a poem the next poem in this anthology is from the journal of a disappointed man by Andrew Motion now when it comes to motion himself he was born in London but he grew up in rural Essex a background which gave him an abiding love for the English countryside these early years were formative in other ways he was introduced to poetry by a supportive school teacher while the early loss of his mother through the writing accident shows much through his work he read English at University College Oxford where he was taught by W. H. Orden and he went on to teach English at the University of Hull where he met the poet Philip Larkin who was another abiding influence when it comes to his poetry it's characterised by an interesting narrative and an understated meditative style which links him to an English tradition that can be traced through Edward Thomas Thomas Hardy and back to Wordsworth he often uses fictionalised narratives and historical events to explore his themes while possessing accessible clarity his poems are powerful for what they omit for what they contain suggesting undercurrents of emotion that his narrators are either aware of or unwilling to disclose now when it comes to the poem itself the key to this poem lies in the contrast between the narrator and the workman that he's observing throughout the poem there's little or no interaction between observer and observed the poem does not comment on but dramatises the distance between the two one obvious contrast is the physical strength and activity of the workman as opposed to the passivity of the narrator or observer a difference compounded by the use of language the title of the poem with this learned tone recalling works of fiction from the 18th to 19th century suggests the narrator is a man who understands literary heritage he's a man of letters his own language is full of long words and complex references very different from the silent workman who when they speak do so with functional simplicity it purports to be a journal entry the poem offers very little by way of insight into the thoughts and emotions of the narrator his feelings about the workman are only hinted at in the metaphors he chooses to describe them these are the only figurative language in the poem and suggests an ambivalent attitude monsters, mystic, original thinker and majesty through this juxtaposition the poem seems to offer the reader two alternative versions of masculinity however by the end of the poem the workman has an answer to the secret problem the old soviet era heroism that might once have attached to this scene of the working man dissipates into listlessness they are engaged in a hopeless task which defeats them and leaves them just as much observers as the narrator the final image of the pile hanging uselessly in mid-air seems symbolic of the whole enterprise the narrator tacitly acknowledging that he too is a fair part the task they engage in, which is repairing a pair might have further symbolic significance pairs are structures that literally don't go anywhere they are also remnants of the Victorian and Edwardian eras a period of remarkable feats of engineering expressive of broader confidence in progress by contrast neither the workman nor the narrator able to offer a way forward this takes us back to the disappointment of which the title applies in different ways to both sets of men one considering other poems to link this to in its concern with contemporary masculinity and its sense of defeat motion's poem has an interesting parallel to Simon Armitage's Chainsaw versus a Pampas Grass as both poems have narrators whose exact relationship to the poet is blurred and they are not clear, card traumatic monologues but in the evasion and ambiguities of the voice they imply a constructed character the next poem in this collection is Look We Have Coming to Dover by Dalgit Nagra Nagra was the first poet to win the forward prize for both his first collection of poetry and for its title of the poem Look We Have Coming to Dover three years earlier a lot of his work has been shortlisted and it's really interesting to consider that his most recent and third collection is a retelling of an ancient Indian myth about Rama's quest to recover his wife Sita from her adoption by Ravana the lord of the underworld this collection being called Gramayana he was born and raised in west London and then sheffield and he currently lives in Harrow with his wife and daughters a lot of his work is driven by the energies of the cultural clash between his Punjabi immigrant background as well as his English lived experiences as well as his citizenship he's concerned with Britishness and Asianness especially the points where these two conditions collide and while his poems deal with serious issues including the racism his experience growing up in England his poems are characteristically upbeat charming and humorous with the formal identity and inventiveness in his language now when it comes to the poem look we have come into Dover the poem's title alerts us to the concepts of England and Englishness which are gleefully dismantled in the rest of the poem the title itself is grammatically incorrect and it sets the context of a speaker for whom English is a second language the mention of Dover one of the entry points in the UK for immigrants legal and illegal provides a further clue as to the narrative voice Dover is also deeply resonant as an English location its famous white cliffs a cultural shorthand for the country's history as an island power it also has a powerful literary heritage as the epigraph reminds us Matthew Arnold's Own Dover Beach is a famous poem written in 1851 which expresses society's growing anxiety about the modern secular world Nagra's poem also echoes Arnold's in the implied presence of a beloved to whom the poem is addressed in contrast to Arnold's poem however the title's exclamation mark is expressive of an energetic optimism which sets the tone for what follows the story in this voice discloses one of hardship and poverty in comparison to the cushy tourists the narrator and his kind have very little power economical otherwise the huddled hatched burdened grafting out of sight and mind but despite this the narrator can imagine a future where they've won the way to prosperity the poem ends where it began with the reference to the Arnold poem a myth called England is symbolised by the white chalk of the Grover cliffs and an exclamation mark the tone and energy of the poem is bound up in its language each stanza is packed with a dizzying array of sound effects rhyme half rhyme alliteration and assonance coupled with this is an infectious irreverence towards proper English Nagra coins new verbs such as flamed on bladders passport us and blared these he mixes with phrases from colloquial English such as gobfalls Scramming, hoik and lingos to form a lively hybrid which mirrors the mixing of cultures that immigration entails the effect is fun and funny both at the expense of the English and also to an extent the expense of the narrator whose dreams of a new life are a parody of aspiration the poem also incorporates language often used by those who see immigration as a threat to national identity it uses words like invade, teamed swarms and it subverts it by putting it in the mouth of an immigrant in this case a Punjabi Indian through this cheerful disregard of standard of correct English and subversion of the tabloid discourse in immigration Nagra puts the issue of what constitutes national identity at the heart of this poem the place in its language are in effect one and the same which gives the narrator's remaking of the letter a satirical and political edge now when considering other poems to compare this to the multicultural complexities of Nagra's poem are also echoed in Ruth Padel's You, Shiva and My Mom for another example of how human can explore serious themes consider Kiran or discourse please hold which makes for an interesting comparison the next poem is Fantasia on a theme of James Wright by Sean O'Brien so O'Brien has been described as a leading poet, editor and critic of his generation he was born in London but grew up in Hull, the northeast its landscapes, history and culture have remained a core influence and concern in his work he has several poetry collections which include the Indoor Park which is the winner of the Somerset-Morgan award the Frightners, Ghost Train and the publication of the Drowned Book he's also achieved the unique feat of winning the forward poetry prize of the best collection for the year and the only poet to have won this prize and he's also won several other prizes when it comes to his writing his imaginative landscape remains rooted in its own version of the north from the bomb streets of Hull to the economic deprivations of its adopted city Newcastle it's a world of hidden gardens, railway lines estuaries, industry and decline a territory he's made his own exploring it with an increasingly intense dream-like quality combining literary-ness with colloquial language O'Brien's work can be angrily satirical but also ruefully humorous in its treatment of its abiding themes of history, politics and class now when it comes to the poem itself Britain's industrial past specifically the life and culture of its miners is hauntingly evoked the title of the poem references a great American poet James Wright whose work often defended the disenfranchised O'Brien's poem also takes a similar approach to the miners commemorating the lost way of life the poem locates the miners who represent underground where they once laboured and where they have now become like ghosts in a very British version of the classical underworld they're seen as passing into history the poem states we hardly hear of them in the face of this oblivion O'Brien's miners are characterised by the gritty stubbornness the caring working refusing to believe that history is done the memory has gone underground where they've become at one with the bedrock they used to dig the narrator however does not have a race tinted attitude towards the past they're not nostalgic there's an implied criticism of the miners' determination to go down in good order and the loyalty to a class which clung to its privations as a badge of honour however the last two stanzas express a deep respect for the miners and a acknowledgement of kinship with them in the moving use rather of the word brothers the language of the poem is a solemn with biblical resonance to this imagery the miners are identified throughout with the founding elements of stone and water an imagery which imparts a sense of grandeur this is matched by the sound of the poem while written as free verse it's nevertheless heavily patterned giving it a formal quality appropriate to its elegiac tone pairs or triplets of alliterating strongly stressed words generate a powerful rhythm expressive of the heavy work that the miners carried out the second third and fourth stanzas in particular use this effect to convey a powerful sense of the miners physical presence while on the one hand the poem seems to accept that the miners are consigned to history by associating them with the fundamentals of life or brian also suggests that the power is not entirely spent singing friction and rush or speak of a presence which retains a collective energy that may one day disturb the future the seam of the past may not be entirely exhausted other poems to compare it to or to link it to are and drew notions poem from the journal of the disappointed man which has a very different take on the industrial past and a celebrity cool tone contrast with a brian's biblical cadences the next poem is Please Hold by Kieran O'Diskell and he is an irish poet whose work blends dark humour and lyrical craft his early influences were classical modernists of the 20th century including T.S. Eliot and St. John's Purse however over time O'Diskell found their purity of style in a bleak manner increasingly at odds with what he wanted to express particularly his anger at political folly and social injustice hence he has turned to satire in his work as an alternative and this has enabled him to create a new poetic voice for which he is best known he now lives in limerick the republic of Ireland now when it comes to the poem itself in his infuriating experience of an automated telephone system O'Diskell finds a deeper metaphor for modern life he is trapped in a world of binary response where any deviation from the set script is met with an incomprehensional delay in his use of repetition O'Diskell creates a horrible maze of language full of wrong turns and dead ends language is reduced to a banality bordering on the meaninglessness it's become purely operational with no room for anomaly or shades of meaning the irony is that should the narrator manage to bypass the system and get through to a real person they'll treat him in just as robotic a fashion the poem has a kind of desperate comedy about it it's funny but with a darker undertone partly due to the repeated insistence that this is a future whether by that it's meant the dominance of automation in our daily lives the failure of language to communicate what we need or the confusions of old age or all of the above isn't made explicit however it's clear the narrator takes a dim view of the future if this is what it means this view is made increasingly clear by the narrator's internal translator who starts to present alternative sarcastic meanings the phrases offered by the automated voice the mention of looting also brings in the outside world briefly hinting that the narrator's impotence in the face of this system has this parallel in how access to money and power is tightly controlled at a societal level the deeper implications of this incident are born out in the final three lines set apart from the rest of the text their progression from old to old to cold is a powerful warning that a whole life might pass by while you wait for the answer you need so most of the other poems in this selection deal with the past with historical and personal this poem is interesting in that it has one foot in the future as does Robert Mihinix the fox in the National Museum of Wales so this is a really good poem you can compare it to this is because both poems use humour but while in Mihinix's poem language is still a vital and creative aspect Idrisgul explores what happens when language is emptied of these qualities the next poem in this collection is Yushiva and my mum by Ruth Padel so Padel is an award-winning British poet, writer and poetry fellow at King's College London and born in London she began her academic and literary career as a classicist studying for a PhD on Greek tragedy at Oxford University where she also taught she has an arrange of poetry collections which have been published and been outlined here and her latest collection is called Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth published in 2014 her work has a bold energy combining consumerism popular culture and classical references and animals are also an abiding source of inspiration and imagery in her richly sensuous poems now when it comes to the poem itself Yushiva and my mum while the main body of this poem affectionately brings to life the character of the narrator's mother a large part of the or rather the poem's power is generated by its use of a question to frame the narrative the poem asks should I tell how of course in the process of asking this question the story is told so the question may be said to be rhetorical with the last stanza acting as confirmation that the story is worth telling however this framing device does raise interesting issues it suggests firstly that the narrator is unsure as to whether to tell the story or not why might this be the case is she worried about embarrassing her mother or whether her mother might be accused of hypocrisy for embracing traditional Indian wedding costumes even though she's a non-believer we perhaps question whether the narrator is concerned that the story will reveal too much about her heritage or that the you of the title might disprove all these possible anxieties are set in train by the questioning structure of the poem and the bubble away under the surface some of these anxieties are also expressed in the shifting perspectives of the poem as introduced by the title the poem is unsure of where to stand the mother has one foot in contemporary western culture and one foot in traditional Indian culture in addition there's a narrator's relationship with the mother on the one hand and the relationship with you on the other this seesawing is emphasised by the pursues of indented stanzas the poem's actual appearance on the page suggesting the shifting ground of its subject matter 8 out of the 12 stanzas are also enjoined the unit of sense breaking across into disorienting effect while the irregular light touch rhymes and half rhymes of the poem bind it together but not too tightly connection and disconnection therefore felt at a structural as well as thematic level what's achieved by the end is a kind of balance the fond laughter of the you in the final statement at the end are reassuring it's okay to be in both worlds the narrator finds inspiration in the physical and mental indomitability of her 8 year old mother her willingness to face physical hardship and to enter into a ritual despite reservations for the sake of her son and his new wife is ultimately seen as a good compromise tribal, hindu, atheist and christian loyalties are brought into fellowship with each other through the wedding ceremony and her mother's role in it and when you're considering other poems to compare to Luke we have come into Dover is an interesting and good comparative poem as it explores cultural diversity though in Padel's poem the journey is inverted with a return to rather than a journey from the current year of origin the next poem to consider is song by George Sertz so he came to England in 1956 as a refugee from Hungary following the Hungarian uprising in Eastern Europe he was educated in England and has always written in English at the heart of his work is the dual perspective of an exile in his work English individualism and Eastern European influences meet creating fascinating tensions a return trip to his native Budapest in 1984 proved a particularly fruitful trigger for his creativity this city has always been a haunting presence in his poetry a result of displacement and the consequent negotiation between a European sensibility and English culture the past is deeply ambiguous vulnerable to the resurrection of memory myth and fairy tale rub shoulders with ordinary details from English life while the maligned presence of history and totalitarian politics hovers at the edges these ambiguities and complexities are held in place by a rigorous and ambitious use of form Terza Reim and the Sonnet are favourites and Sertz has commented on the importance of him or Reim describing it as an unexpected salvation the paper nurse that somehow against all the odds helps us stick the world together while all the time drawing attention to its own fabricated nature now when it comes to the poem itself the poem celebrates small actions which cumulatively can make a difference it's dedicated to the South African white liberal activist Helen Sussman who campaigned all her adult life against the apartheid system this is a context for a poem which honours the collective power of protest as the title suggests pattern of sound particularly Reim and repetition are central to the poem's effect the poem is split into three sections which mirror the basic chorus verse chorus structure of a song the central two stanzas develop and comment on what's presented in the first and third sections the poem insists that a single voice or hand when joined with others can bring to effect change the idea is explored through opposing images of heaviness and lightness, the feather that can tip the balance of a sinking ship followed by the repetition of the word wait four times the sense of shift is also present in the short largely enjambed lines which provide a momentary hiatus as the eye and the mind hang briefly in the air before landing on the solid ground in this word the weaving of repeated and near repeated words through the poem suggests a gathering momentum the most important tipping point in the poem is the one between nothing and something this comes to fruition in the final stanza when the crucial change takes place from till to then the process of transformation has begun with the alteration of a single word which changes the meaning of the line completely in doing so, Sertzi's brilliantly demonstrates in words exactly the kind of small act his poem champions form and meaning become indivisible and when you're considering other poems linked to the very different uses and effects of rhyme can be teased out by comparing Sertzi's controlled elegant poem with the edgy humour of Leonidas Flynn's the furthest distances of travelled or the griff and regret of Alan Jenkins' effect the next poem is on her blindness by Adam Thorpe and Thorpe is a poet, novelist and playwright he was born in Paris in 1956 and grew up in India, Cameroon Cameroon in England and so this cosmopolitan experience is giving him an outsider's view of England combined with a strong sense of Englishness a theme which takes towards in various genres as a poet, Thorpe is consistently sympathetic in his observation of human life particularly his own family's history as well as the rhythms of social change in the natural world he currently lives in France with his wife and three children now when it comes to the poem itself the sense of sight is often dominant in poetry and so the poet's exploration of his mother's loss of sight makes the reader go into unusual territory Thorpe conveys the impact on his mother through detail which convinces us as coming from direct experience his mother's difficulty with eating her dodging like awkwardness and the long list of things she did while pretending she could still see all these give us a moving insight into the living hell she's trying to cope with they also remind us that she's become the observed instead of the observing a shift which has a potential for humiliation though the narrator stresses she kept her dignity the language of the poem is largely plain conversational with comparatively literal figurative language one similarly as Blanketstone feels applicable to the poem's spare style the only splash of colour comes at the end in the description of the autumn leaf or golden ablaze royal which are all reminders of the riches that the mother has lost the mother's predicament is also conveyed through thoughts, through uses of enjambement, not just across lines but across stanzas this breaking of units of sense across the white space between stanzas has a disorienting effect making it hard for the reader to negotiate the poem's meaning as in U.A. Fanthorpe's a minor role dialogue plays a significant part the second line contains a statement one shouldn't say it and this division between what can and can't be said runs through the poem the one time the mother is honest about her situation the narrator is unable to respond with a similar candle miss the time she pretends she can see that she's doing okay even when close to death she maintains the fiction it's lovely out there the last line suggests that even after death she's subject to the comforting fiction which lies to imagine the dead watching over us part of the poem's power lies in both the narrator's acknowledgement of the lies of ourselves in the face of rigility and aging and his regret in looking the wrong way the Tut of the Poem is an adaptation of a famous sonnet by John Milton called On His Blindness written in 1655 after the poet's loss of sight became complete in it, Milton initially chafes at his condition and how it limits his ability to serve God but the poem ends with the resolve to bear his loss patiently for they also serve who only stand and wait thought's poem is partly a rebuff of Milton's stoicism of those who, like a Roman put up with affliction without complaint another poem to compare it to in the exploration of the difficulty of talking honestly about physical decline are UA fan thought's minor role and whilst their contrasting use of the first person perspective results in very different poems these two poems are really used worth considering comparing the next poem to consider is Ode on a Grace and Perry earned by Tim Turnbull now Turnbull grew up in the village of Episton in North Yorkshire and after leaving school he worked for the forestry commission for eight years before moving to Cumbria to study forestry at Neurig College and between 1979 and 1994 he played and sang with a series of punk industrial bands in the summer of 2004 he travelled to Germany to take part in the Poesidium and Nebraska project and we find that of course he was awarded several Scottish arts bursaries and he's also an award winning creative writer he also worked as a freelance tutor and consultant specialising in adult literary publishing for various agencies across Scotland now when it comes to the poem itself Ode to Grace and Perry on an Earn this poem takes its inspiration directly from John Keats's Ode on a Gracian Earn both in terms of its subject matter and its verse form this relationship with an earlier model sets up many different resonances Keats's Ode was inspired by his contemplation of a Greek vase dating from classical times depicting scenes from ancient life including lovers, gods, musical celebrations and religious rites the poem grows out of the tension between the vivid sense of life conveyed by these scenes and their stillness caught forever by the artist in a moment of suspended time Turnbull's poem is also about a decorated piece of pottery in this case by the celebrated contemporary artist Grace and Perry who won the Turner Prize in 2003 his ceramics are famous for his combination of classic forms with utterly contemporary decorations which often feature scenes from the underbelly of British life or at least working class culture frequently derided by the more aspirational media a class of cultures is inbuilt in much of his work thus Turnbull's poem shifts this clash into the poetic arena using the formality and literary heritage of Keats's original as a means of reproducing the tensions of Perry's work in Keats's poem it's the alienation of time which generates a distance between poet and narrator and the culture he's examining and in Perry's work in his poem it's the distance between classes between the kids tearing up the suburban estates and the hot hatches and the kind of education and sophistication which knows what an ode is and how to use it however while acknowledging the distance between himself and his subject Turnbull's poem as is the case with Keats's original seeks to empathize with or make a connection to the people depicted in the vase this can be seen in how the language of the poem develops from stanza to stanza the first stanza replicates much of the language a tabloid post might use when combining these young people crap estates, lotus, bedlam equally dismissive of Perry's art describing it as a Kishi vase knocked out by a Shirley Turnbull monkey so for example do you note that Perry is famously noted as a transvestite with a little girl alter ego called Claire however towards the end of this stanza there's a shift as the poet recognises that Perry's art is more powerful and subtle than a mere tabloid expose as Keats's Grecian urn the artist has managed to convey both the frenetic physicality of these young people and the sense of peace the shift is seen in stanza 2 when concerned for the safety of these kids as they indulge in their high risk thrills emerges in the tender word children yes the behaviours antisocial promiscuous are responsible but they are after all only children the bovado hiding vulnerability and hopelessness about the future which is for the rich they also seem far more alive than the dead suburban streets and the pensioners and parents turnbull builds on this idea in the final stanza which imagines a future poet contemplating a Perry urn as removed from its context as Keats was from the world of ancient Greece confronted by Perry's garish celebration of the raw energy the poem wonders whether this poet will find beauty and inspiration in these young people the language at this point becomes more formal more Keatsian in fact it states raised to level dust free and bountiful how happy were these creatures then this poignancy in this as the rest of the poem makes clear these young people are far from free and bountiful or happy however turnbull's closing line which echoes the famous dictum of Keats's poem beauty is truth truth beauty is a reminder to all of us to think about how we look at others turnbull's and Perry's gift is to dignify these children and dismiss for wider society so that they become fit subjects for art another poem you can link it to are Daljeet Nagro's book we have coming to Dover because like this poem turnbull's poem takes an inspiration from a classic poem in the past both demonstrate how poetry is an ongoing dialogue between poets across time in its high mixture of culture and working class lives and the tension arising from these turnbull's poem also makes a surprising link to Haney's book so that's all if you found this extensive examination of the poetry anthology poems across the decades useful do give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel but also don't forget to visit our website which is www.firstrate tutors.com there you can find lots of revision material worksheets as well as model answers that you can use to help in your understanding and your writing of this anthology and also lots of other subject areas thank you so much for listening