Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

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Literary allusion takes on a typographical turn when the tadpoles in the water’s “sandy shallows” are seen as “hundreds / and hundreds of fat commas swept / from the compositor’s workbench …” The metaphor may connect the double life of the amphibian with the coexistence of type and text, print and language. It may also allude to one of the translations in Rowan Williams’s collection, In the Days of Caesar by Waldo Williams. The latter is a beautiful poem, intensely of and for Wales and the Welsh people, but suggesting a transformation that seems boundless. This is the last stanza: If you aren’t too keen on this fate for your child, take heart. A different version of the poem has Wednesday’s Child fated to be “merry and glad”. You can see this version below in the Variations section. Thursday’s Child To cut to the chase, who wins the argument? Although Slog has the last word in the form of a punchy aphorism, “Windows don’t happen”, he must know, as a poet, that they sometimes do, or at least appear to. Sunlight, both poets would concede, is the necessity: the dilemma concerns the best way to invite it in.

I first discovered the poetry of the 14th-century Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym when, planning a poem about my roof-nesting herring-gull family, I cast around the internet for company and ideas. I was thrilled by the radiance of the poem I discovered, Yr Wylan: Gwilym’s seagull soars, alive and shining, even in English translation. Rhyme enhances the rueful comedy of the quatrains. Although “know it/poet” is an old familiar, it’s refreshed by the two ruthless epithets the speaker applies to himself: “baldy, wingless”. Finally, more alone than ever, he shrugs off what might be seen as the ultimate rejection. The crestfallen toad has “buggered off” and now the poet will do likewise, having announced, “Old toady-boyo’s really me”. This sounds like a confession of failure, but the questions at the start of the stanza have sounded their warning: “Well, is it really such an awful croak? / Can’t you see the bright glint in his eye?” Toads, like poets, should not be underestimated.More than half of children and young people surveyed (54%) told us they do not currently engage with poetry. The National Literacy Trust (2018) Of course, there are some readers who will interpret this negatively, fearing that their child is fated to be shallow, vain, and flightly. For Hannah Stone’s narrator, the second sleep is a haunt of deeper nightmare, and the dream she recounts evokes an involuntary dash at an uncontrollable and fatal pace. The “bruised psyche” is strapped on a hurdle, being dragged along by galloping horses driven by the dead. One of the definitions of “hurdle”, and the most relevant to this nightmare, is “a frame or sled formerly used in England for dragging traitors to execution”. Portents accumulate as the first four couplets move through an election-orientated calendar, repeating the doubly chilling phrase, “the election of the dictator”. The world of the poem, and the world it says is ours, is subject to the irrational and unlikely. Nature is shown to foreshadow unnatural times in which even democratic elections can produce monsters. Note: in print, Second Sleep has the right-hand marginal justification usual to the prose poem, but impossible to reproduce here. The italics have been added for this online text with the author’s permission.)

Children born on a Wednesday are associated with a great amount of empathy and compassion. They are thought to be a bit gloomy and moody, full of woe because they feel empathy and sadness for others. Wednesday children carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. But this can be their superpower that enables them to do great things for others, and be a good friend and partner to others. To promote the vital role that poetry plays in all our lives – poetry has the power to bring people and communities together There’s an ominously placed line-break between the third and fourth lines of the second verse: “tolled” takes the emphasis, and is repeated in the first line of verse three. The bell seems solidly installed “between the cold and dark”. But something changes. The narrator comments on the quality of the bird’s song (“a clear true voice he had”) and perhaps it’s envy that prompts the bell’s response. We’re not told how its pitch or pace are altered – only that the narrator “knew it” (the bell) “had gone mad”. Pool is from the New Poems section of Rowan Williams’s Collected Poems. As well as the Waldo Williams translation mentioned earlier, Poem of the week has previously featured Rowan Williams’s poem about the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev. And in perhaps the most ridiculous poem of all, Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe writes about when is the best day to cut one’s nails, asking “ would bid yong folks beware on what day they par’d their nayles”?:

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Children born on a Tuesday are typically associated with good manners, grace, refinement and elegance.They are considered courteous and full of good will. A “Book of Hours’” depicting “turrets”, “red-thorn bowers” and “ladies in bright tissue” – can such images really belong to a poem by DH Lawrence? Grey Evening first appeared in the 1916 collection, Amores. Some of the pieces in his first collection, Love Poems and Others (1912), are less concerned with static images, more freely constructed. In many ways Grey Evening a traditional love lyric. At times, its lapidary quality reflects the medieval Book of Hours which provides its central metaphor. Upper Kentmere, an area once prey to the Scottish raiders (reivers), belongs now the Lake District National Park. There are areas in the British Isles that have been turned into museums of the ideal: they exist for tourists and the associated hospitality industries. Beautiful and comfortable, they stimulate false images of nationhood, they are part of an identity through consumption. On the other hand, some interpretations hold that this child may have a difficult path in front of them. This week’s poem, recalling the experience of wild camping on Dartmoor, was Sean Borodale’s response on 13 January to a local landowner case against the use of the moorland for this purpose. In a prose-note to the poem, Borodale wrote: “Wild camping is a frail, frayed remnant of deeper engagement, and the writing of this poem is an appeal against the belief that powerful landscapes are only for the wealthy, to be reserved for specific kinds of recreation – hunting, shooting – or as passing photo opportunities.”

That the birds’ hunger has been aroused is suggested by their “making a moan” – they’re not simply making a noise, but are disturbed and excited. When the alpha crow sets out the plan, the other bird, notably, doesn’t argue. The two are a couple, with a nest to furnish. If the male bird is lording it over the hen, the hen doesn’t complain. The whole poem is designed as a unity, the syntax and verses flowing into one another like the interrelated ecologies they reflect. While it’s a didactic poem, with a central commitment to the variously “hard” environmental sciences, Down Here You’re With the Possible is also “down here” with the human need for poetry. It sustains our visual pleasure; it has the verbal music and texture that irresistibly appeal to “the blind inner life”. So, do you think your child’s personality could be tied to the day of the week they were born? Or, is it all a bunch of rubbish? Now other metaphorical shapes appear. The sun is “God’s ball”: it also has a mysterious, special “fringe”. The metaphors are given more space and separation in the original, but there’s something to be said for the clustering in the shortened version. The sun after all is no simple object. No one can hold it steady. It can change shape radically as the eye perceives it at different times of day and through various kinds of weather. Again, Gwilym avoids the self-centred lyric rhetoric of an Elizabethan sonneteer or Romantic love poet. Gwilym’s voice always sound natural, even at its most elevated. Here, the diction is flatter, plainer. Even temporary absence is a state of dull, starless loss.Wylie takes a rather different view of ecclesiastical imagery in Sunset on the Spire, an interesting comparison with The Church-Bell. Here, the transcendence is benign: “From the sun’s dome / I am shouted proof / that this is my home, / And that is my roof.” Without the demanding bell, merely a sunlit spire, the speaker is at home on earth. There is a popular contemporary Christian song by Curtis Chapman called “Tuesday’s Child”. In this song, he interprets the meaning of Tuesday’s Child’s as having a strong faith in God. From this verse on, environmental damage accumulates. Padel sums up the sad, complicated story of the collapse of the Gulf Stream’s system of warm ocean-currents in the anthropomorphism of “failing muscles”. The image gives animal form and activity to the water, and suggests how all animals, ourselves included, will suffer, and are suffering, as the ice caps melt and the sea levels rise. The next “slide” in the visual presentation sweeps us into the core of the Chacaltaya glacier. Bolivia’s only ski resort has already been destroyed: that big number which gives its age (“two-hundred-and-fifty- // million-year core”) is tidily contrasted in the mimetic final stanza, tracing the glacier’s final shrinkage to an area “now shingle / and a fossil-feather-memory / of ice.” Again, the image of a living creature, one that could fly and, at least metaphorically, leave a “fossil-feather memory” in the landscape which humans used and destroyed, adds an intimate dimension to vast geological process. Reviewing The Marble Bed in the East Hampton Star, Julie Sheehan pointed out that the poems also represent a “quarrel” with Dante. Schulman may sometimes organise her poem into tercets, but she doesn’t write terza rima, and rarely uses end-rhyme. There’s also a more flexible syllable count than that of Dante’s hendecasyllabic line: Schulman often interleaves 12- and 11-syllable lines, as in Because. Beyond this formal level, Schulman also challenges Dante’s cosmology, the tripartite universe of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso in the Divine Comedy. Schulman’s contemporary urban settings are closer to those of Montale, memory-haunted, tangled, impure. Heaven and hell are twisted together inextricably. Because is a poem that emphasises and even honours this condition. The calculator uses Zeller’s Algorithm, which can determine the day of the week for any date in the past, present or future, for any dates between 1582 and 4902. Simple enter your date of birth, and the day of the week in which you were born will appear.

This is a terrific verse, in which contradictions blur in the narrative’s rapid pace. The speaker has no sooner said, “He will not/ stay the night” than the lovers are out under the stars, and “he” starts the car. A brief reference to the name he likes to be called and the fact he “Needs to be called/ something, anything” suggests hard-won empathy. The narrator defines his “obligation” and enacts the “obliging”. His imperatives to self are beautifully paced over the line-breaks, and the repetition of “Give/ thanks. Give thanks” summons the spirit of an end-of-sermon blessing, as if solemnising the earlier “scripture” reference. Gladitorial combat ends in an after-glow of benediction. Is the “simulacrum” better than the original event? There may still be questions, but for now a reader can only be grateful for the ringside seat. There wasn’t love but there was what love becomes —”. This is an enticingly authoritative opening statement: who doesn’t want to know what love is and isn’t and what it sometimes becomes? In which direction will the speaker send us? Love poetry is a long-lived, heavily worked genre: queer love poetry is part of that tradition, but, if not always silenced, it has been muffled and narrowly boxed inside it. Now, if a queer poet has Olayiwola’s skill, passion and daring, they can re-launch reader expectations and alter the gravitational forces that bind us. Poetry is an important vehicle to explore individual identity and the identity of others. CLPE The Power of Poetry (2017)

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The five-lined stanzas flexibly worked in iambic pentameter, are unrhymed. The choice of blank verse, perhaps another way the poem relates to the Mahabharata, is ideal for conveying the relentless drive of the speaker to “talk on by”.