Fancy Listening to Poets Reading their Work?

I have just come across this wonderful website. It's an online collection of recordings of poets reading their work - and it's free of charge.With contemporary and historical recordings, as well as a children's archive and resources for students, it's well worth a look.

Poetry Archive

Christmas Poetry - Is it all just Tinsel and Christmas Trees?

A little bit late, but my excuse is that I love Christmas and have really wrapped myself up in it over the last two weeks. I have been thinking about all the different ways that poetry can express this special time of year; and it’s far from being a myriad of poems about tinsel and Christmas trees!

I came across a review of Carol Ann Duffy’s (the UK’s Poet Laureate) latest book-length children’s poem ‘The Christmas Truce’ (www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/truc-d27.shtml)

Duffy’s poem highlights the events leading up to an unofficial ceasefire between British and German troops during Christmas WW1, and illustrates the horror of the conditions in the frozen, flooded trenches. She uses beautiful imagery to imbue her harsh, desperate setting with Christmas magic:

Silver frost on barbed wire, strange tinsel

But Duffy is doing so much more with this poem:

But it was Christmas Eve; believe; 
belief thrilled the night air,

As Christmas dawns, the British and German troops sing as one voice, they show each other pictures of their loved ones and they exchange gifts of biscuits and tea. Duffy has used the harsh reality of the trenches to create a poignant beauty – a hope for all mankind. We can really believe, if just for this fleeting moment, that there is hope for us. 

Her poem also shows us that there is more to Christmas poetry than tinsel and Christmas trees. For many, it is an emotional and significant time of year. There are families who are thinking of their loved ones in the Middle East this year, and my thoughts go out to them.

This is a truly beautiful poem, and well worth a read.  She has sprinkled it with the magic of Christmas. It's a war torn landscape, covered with a clean, new blanket of snow.

Read the full poem here http://www.my-best-books.co.uk/the-christmas-truce-2/

My Week- As A Poem

27th Nov - 3rd Dec 2011

You have feasted on me;

taken you pound of flesh.

Cut savagely,

and discarded all the rest.

You have dined upon my dreams-

devoured my soul as well.

Then picked your rotten teeth clean,

and crawled back down to Hell.

My Week- As A Poem

Photo by Danny Boyster

21st - 26th November 2011

I look through an obscure view, from the bottom
right-hand windowpane -
heavy with condensation;
and dripping with rain. 

Blurry - out of focus -
all wrong.
But the glass will clear again,
when the rain has gone.

My Week- As A Poem

 14th - 20th November 2011

All things pass,

And all things change;

Nothing can ever stay the same.

The wheel turns,

To carry us on;

And soon we find, what was,

Has gone.

Thought for the Week

"Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.'

John Keats (1795 - 1821)

Nothing

Photo by Alan Cleaver - http://www.flickr.com/photos/alancleaver/

Nothing but ticking clocks,

non-stop.

An irremovable blot.

A ceaseless movement forward

into nothing.

Nothing but wondering why

our time seems to fly,

or what's beyond the sky.

Why do we even bother, to try.

Nothing.

Surely there's a point

to our creaking joints?

A meaning

behind all these feelings.

Nothing, but old photographs

in a worn-out frame,

of a long-forgotton name;

that will still only fade,

to

nothing.

Emma Barrett

Peaceful, Calming Seas

Photo by Mckay Savage -http://www.flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/

I sail above your mirrored depths –

On shades of jade and green;
That roll and crash above a world;

Immersed, and sub-marine.

Your skin that strokes the waiting shores –

A call to come and play;

In tides that rise, then drift away,

At different times each day.

A veil of sea spray whips the bow,

And trips upon the water;

On gentle swell, through glassy wave,

That sighs with salt aroma.

Let me drift upon your depths,

Gently rocked to ease.

On silent, blue that meets the sky,

On peaceful, calming seas.

Emma Barrett