Elizabeth Bishop watercolour, gouche and ink – Tombstone for Sale
Poetry attracts the most diverse practitioners of the art as the selection from this month’s session indicates. From primates to feminists, people of all genders and sexual inclinations adopt poetry as their mode of contemplating the world, and if possible reforming it, according to their vision. Our collection this month is a sprightly representation of the manifold well-springs of poetry.
Coincidentally, all four nations comprising the United Kingdom were represented: Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Their voices could not have been more different, nor their preoccupations more varied. It was uisge beatha (whiskey) in Scotland, farting frogs in Ireland, tadpoles in Wales, and serving tea to friends in England. Even their language was distinct: from joyous singing and revelry in Scotland, to the dull monotone of England; the loving naturalist’s gaze on a precisely observed body of water on an Irish farm, to the textual metaphors of a Welshman obsessed with language.
UK Poets – Burns, Eliot, Heaney, Williams
At this session there were three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature – the second woman ever to win it, Syzmborska; and Heaney whose birthright language was Gaelic; and of course, T.S. Eliot who won it in 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.” Syzmborska was initially allied to the Communist ideology but later renounced her earlier views and defended free speech. Heaney will be remembered for his magnificent translation of Beowulf, a classic of Olde English. Heaney renders into poetry – a throbbing action-packed tale of the hero Beowulf, summoned by Hrothgar, king of the Dames, to defeat the under-sea monster Grendel. Joe read excerpts from it at a 2006 session of KRG (not on the Web).
Seamus Heaney – Beowulf cover
Five women and five men among the poets selected, speaks to an even gaze on the world of poetry. Our women readers are as likely to choose women poets as they are to incline to poets of the male order. In the past we have had sessions exclusively devoted to women poets, as a theme, but they seem to rise up even without pre-selection.
Women Poets Collage: Barnes, Bishop, Szymborska, Doshi, Limon
