On This Day

It seems today is National Poetry Day back in the UK. The whole business of having 'Days' for various causes and the like is, of course, fundamentally silly, but anything that reminds the population at large of how much enjoyment there is to be found in poetry - reading, writing, listening to it - is a good thing. I'm not suggesting everyone should take up encountering the stuff as, mysteriously from my point of view, there are those who genuinely don't get it and I don't think anyone should force them to. But I reckon there remain lots of folk who would have their lives considerably enhanced through acquiring the taste, even if it's just for a couple of writers they can get into. My old mate Tony was a huge Ted Hughes fan, but I don't remember him referencing a single other poet in all the time I knew him.
 
My latest enthusiasm in this line is for the work of Alice Oswald. I read her wonderful collection about the river, Dart, a year or so ago and it hugely impressed me. She struck me as a bit of a kinder, gentler Hughes in her way, which is a bit of a superficial summary but will have to do for now. I finished another, more recent collection from her, entitled Memorial, last week and, whilst I don't think it's quite as immediately appealing as Dart, it confirmed for me her gifts. Memorial takes us into the world of the Iliad. It's a sort of loose translation of Homer, reminding me of Fagles at times, but reduces the epic to a series of pithy killings of one victim after another. Unpleasantly, but necessarily, violent. Powerful stuff.
 
I also read Manohar Shetty's Living Room. This was one I just picked randomly from the shelves when I was 'spending' the book tokens I was given back in September for my talk on poetry at the Literature Seminar. (I feel obliged to buy poetry with the tokens for some reason.) I'd never heard of him before, which is not entirely surprising as he lives in India and his poetry seems intended at least in the first instance for a local audience. Nothing earth-shaking, but highly competent, and easy to understand - which even for someone with a taste for baffling obscurity like myself is, sometimes, a welcome break.
 
Now I'm a few poems into Julia Copus's The World's Two Smallest Humans. Bought this on the strength of the cheerful title and because she's won a couple of awards. Yes, not very deep of me, I know, but I enjoy 'discovering' names new to me in this way. So far, so good: lots of variation of style and subject matter even in just a few poems which means I can't quite pin the lady down yet - and I suspect she'd be pleased to hear that.