Poetry

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So does anyone else like reading poetry?

The book I am reading ( see books of letters thread) on the first world war has sent me back to looking at Rupert Brooke. I never studied these at school, and am finding them very moving.

I like Wendy Cope and Seamus Heaney.

sal 26

Love Wilfred Owen & Ted Hughes.

tui

i love poetry. i first discovered Leonard Cohen when my boyfriend gave me a book of his poems for my 16th birthday. He had asked our English teacher what to give me.

i love the poetry of several NZ poets including James K Baxter, Hone Tuwhare, Ursula Bethell and Sam Hunt. Many of my poetry books are now gracing my daughters bookshelves. she offered to take a photo so I knew which ones she had!

I have a collection of English poetry which belonged to my Grandfather. I loved reading them as a child when we visited him and later when he lived with us. Byron, Keats, Yeats, Shelley, Wordsworth etc.
Smile

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Sal, Tui and others who like the war poets - have you seen the digital archives? I've put a link below- you can see many of the poems written in the poets hand, there are also biographies and photos etc. I've only just begun to explore it, take a look.

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections

tui

i will have a look. my grandads both went to WW1 but neither talked about it when i was a child and now they are dead as well as my father and uncles so i missed an opportunity to find out first hand their experiences. Mum discovered Dad's diary from when he was training overseas in WW2. he had never told her about it. Dad didn't fight as he was too young and the war finished just as he was completing his training as a navigator.
He contracted TB though and spent 3 years in a sanatorium adfter the war.

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My dad was a mosquito reconnaissance pilot in WW2 - he used to search the Atlantic for U - boats. He was stationed in Canada and survived his plane crashing in the snow fields. He was rescued by Indian trappers on a sledge. I wish now I'd talked to him more about it all. At his funeral we had a poem called ‘High Flight’ that he loved, it was written by a spitfire pilot John Gillespie Magee. I scanned in Dad’s ‘wings’ from his uniform and an extract from his flying log into the funeral service booklet. It was his entry from the same day as his funeral was held but in 1943. It described how many twists, turns and spins he did in his plane that day. I thought about him high in the sky in his plane during the funeral service. It seemed right somehow.

You can read the poem here
http://www.deltaweb.co.uk/spitfire/hiflight.htm

tui

That poem is beautiful. it is sad that it took a war for young men to be able to do things such as fly aeroplanes or travel overseas.

now young people travel anyway but looking at my son who is 20 i shudder at the thought of him having to fight in a war.

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I agree, it is sad. When I look at the photos of my Dad and his mates in the RAF, they look so young.

redredrobin

This website is amazing too - poets reading their own poems. The historic recordings are incredible as you can't believe you would hear these poets:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do

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Thanks very much for the link rrr, I had visited this before but had forgotten about it.

sal 26

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Yes I like to see that sort of detail too.

sal 26

Sometimes just changing the tenses - on the page just a tiny flick of the pen - can change the feel of the line. Love the power of poetry & it was my favourite part of English at school - just the craft of it really, the layers of meaning, sometimes the obscurity of the meaning at first reading and how so much is often compressed into so few words.

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Glad I'm not on my own here, one of my favourite collections of poetry on my shelf is

Staying Alive - Real Poems for Unreal Times, ed Neil Astley