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

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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. 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. Poetry is an important vehicle to explore individual identity and the identity of others. CLPE The Power of Poetry (2017) Ultimately, of course, there’s no Krishna to bring light and redemption to this moral anguish. If the writing of a poem might once have had redemptive potency, the poet now disconnects the current by her question “What has a poem got to do with this?” The question seems to anticipate the answer, “nothing: it’s no help to anyone – not even the poet”.

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. In the last line of the translation, the Old English compound “wordhoard” may suggest that lesser nations, too, will be redeemed, as poems, or perhaps one poem, by the “laureate of heaven”. The tadpoles in Pool are perhaps the punctuation marks vital to opening the verbal treasury. Sharing indecision about what further movements they can risk without scaring the bird, the couple seems to achieve a stilled unity – “There we stand, looking up”. It’s as if they’d forgotten any expectations about nuthatch behaviour and were simply lost in looking. But it’s then that “the bird moves down the tree, headfirst.” 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.The shared absence the poem records is not necessarily the result of death. Perhaps a child has left home? That form of bereavement, popularly tagged “empty nest syndrome”, might have been quietly set up in the earlier reference to the birds no longer singing, no longer coming to the window sill to be fed. In its very reticence to describe the nature of the loss, the poem shows us it was a radical one. Wisely, the last verse doesn’t seek or foresee “closure”, but observes simply that after more “such days”, the weather will change, perspective will be returned. And so the scene is almost set for words to flow again. 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”.

The sonnet begins with an occupation by, rather than of, a place. That place is the sky: it feels so close it tells the speaker “what it is to have the stars/sown through the utility of the body”. The body is like a field, the word “sown” suggests, which has been seeded with stars. Rich harvest is implied, but the simply stated cancellations of the second verse register a lonelier mood. The tent, “the chapel of the canvas” provides a necessary refuge, its artificial sky sealing the speaker into a place of more internal focus. Beehive chapels come to mind. Revelation occurs in the perception of “how deeply I was momentary”. To be “momentary” might assume time to be threatening, but to be momentary “deeply” suggests an analogy with music, and how a single note, of one beat or less, can still be a chord, an embedding of vertical harmonies. Although the musical analogy isn’t made directly, the poem now seems to slip easily into the auditory world, central to which is listening to the minutest sounds, and “a new aptitude for silence”. 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. There’s a human narrator, but s/he bows out after three lines. Of the two crows, one has a single, though essential, line: “Where sall we gang and dine today?” The other, having reconnoitred the scene already and worked out the feeding strategy, replies in vivid, uncompromising detail. Anthropomorphism of this kind can be justified on the grounds that the invented bird-talk reflects real, observable bird behaviour regarding food, territory and judicious co-operation. A more detailed glossary can be found here, as well as the texts of The Twa Corbies and The Three Ravens. Satyamurti’s “room of last resort”, a passage leading to one of London’s tube stations is a familiar literary underground, too. The scene of escape that opens Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting, where the dead have exchanged unbearable battlefield chaos for futureless stasis might be an appropriate dimension. The poem continually evokes a kind of suspended animation in the rough sleepers, reflecting their tenuous and seemingly superfluous existence in terms like “strung out” and “stunned” (which could also suggest drug or alcohol addiction) and in the stanza-crossing enjambment in the first 15 lines. Satyamurti takes a long look at the passivity to which homeless people have been reduced; they are seen in a long view, over time, and have blurred into a near-collective identity. Although some may be only temporary “residents” (“you pass four, sometimes more”) they are intentionally reduced to types.

His poem, Le Crapaud, an inverted sonnet, has its own sour fun with voice and tone, but Forshaw goes further, seizing the opportunity for a rich brew of English and American-English slang, with terms such as “gob”, “dekko”, “buggered off”, “old toady-boyo”, clobbering the ear with melancholy-merry gusto. The possibilities of “knowing” and “thinking we know” expand towards knowing what someone else is thinking. In this case the speaker imagines the interlocutor’s continuing perplexity contains a sense of the magical. The indivisibility of “how things are” and “how we make them out to be” isn’t a bothersome philosophical problem, but, for the fresh explorer of reality, a power-attracting force, “a curse or some sort of spell”. An unexpected question mark at the end of stanza four indicates a gentle respect for the interlocutor: the insight into their thoughts and emotions isn’t simply presumed.

National Poetry Day celebrations have got bigger and bigger each year, with more and more people joining in. On the other hand, some interpretations hold that this child may have a difficult path in front of them. Because of the association of Monday’s child being cute and adorable, “Monday’s Child” has been a popular choice of name for modern children’s clothing boutiques.

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”. At first glance, the poem looks formal. It might be a 20th-century Elizabethan song, with verses cut to a regular length. Only they’re not: the first verse has seven lines, the second eight, the third nine – two odd numbers bookending an even one. It’s as if even at the most basic level of form, there’d been a decision both to reflect stasis – the immutable “lunar beauty”– and the movement of time. In the crucial line in verse two, “time is inches”, and one might add that time is also the pulse of the poem, the dimeter rhythm carrying the thought from line to line, the sonic pattern of assertions and echoes. 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. Gwilym glorifies Morfudd, said to be a rich merchant’s wife from Aberystwyth, as a troubadour might glorify his lady, but from closer quarters. For all her bejewelled brightness, she is no static icon, rather a force of nature. When we first see her, it seems she is naked, “a sheen of snow on a pebbly field”. Then she is transformed into a breaking wave, with its surface foam and unfurling “breast” of colour, its play of sunlight and echo. There’s no need for any superlative claim that Morfudd is more beautiful than these natural phenomena. In Gwilym’s poem, human beauty never eclipses nature, but is equal in the whole sacred constellation.

Prose poetry is a genre that particularly interests the poet-theologian Hannah Stone. Her passion for the genre is reflected in previous anthology publications, a chapter in the essay collection Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice and three unpublished pamphlets in preparation – among them, the enticingly named Twenty-Nine Volumes. Sunday is the traditional Sabbath Day, so it makes sense that a child born on this day is thought to be fortunate and happy. A child born on Sunday is thought to be blessed with positive traits.It’s just a short poem, but it has had a huge impact on parents through the generations, hoping to gain some insight into the future that beholds their precious child. Second Sleep is an evocative phrase: it could connote death, the post-death sleep some religions believe occurs before resurrection, or an uncanny, perhaps magical, daylight doze. Hannah’s explanation chimed with my own experience: I often “sleep off” my first tiredness for a couple of hours, then feel fresh enough to start a mini-day. The second sleep brings the most interesting dreams. For me, they often dramatise a long-term fear, and have a mysteriously shadowy public setting – railway station, airport, concert hall, classroom. I have some control of these spaces, being simultaneously lost and in a determined kind of hurry. Escalators, corridors and occasionally a gigantic computer screen (aaaaaargh) may feature. Meanwhile, a protective circle is drawn round the beauty of the lover, sealing it from censure, shame, regret. In the transcendent moment of adoration, Eros may be a transgression, and the last four lines, part incantation, part blessing, command love not to “near / the sweetness here”. As at the beginning of the poem, the “lunar beauty” exemplifies only itself. Children born on a Tuesday are typically associated with good manners, grace, refinement and elegance.They are considered courteous and full of good will. The latest collection by the Galway-based poet Rachel Coventry, The Detachable Heart, has its share of sensuously down-to-earth love poems, more than a few of which are spiked with disenchantment. There are images of love as damage, and, in the title poem, the disclosure of both the wound and its healing becomes for the speaker an enabler of poetry (“I will wear the scar proudly. / It will be my next collection”). The last line of The Detachable Heart, in a poem called Punishment, fearlessly proclaims its edict: “Let the ferocious heart love,” having insisted that, despite the lover’s depiction as an “old Tantalus”, “the heart wants what it wants”.