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

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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. Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build Allison even complicates the meaning of “succeeded” in these striking lines: “The day of easy speech / Succeeded soon by love and fright.” It’s possible that the day succeeded, ie was successful, because of “love and fright” or that it was succeeded (followed) by love and fright. The latter makes more sense – but then there would need to be a comma after the sub-clause, “and they / Made madness out of reach”.

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. 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. The title of this week’s poem anticipates analogy, the construction of the human self in geographical terms. It might suggest a creative-writing or therapeutic exercise prompted by the question “If you were a place, what sort of place would you be?” This would be an amusing and perhaps revealing assignment, but Bennet’s poem does something more strange and complicated with that act of translation: the person is also present, and often construed separately from the self-as-place. When the speaker’s gaze takes us, via the balcony, beyond the cosy inner sanctum of “sufficient booze / and shabby furniture” the view is presented objectively. The person who is the place has a long-sighted perspective on their own geography. Bennet’s angle is to blend the aesthetic and informative. Watery inlets are turned from pewter to bronze by the evening sun, “a habitat where rare / plants learn to live with salt, and birds nest on the ground”. A reader might be tempted to identify a seascape of the mind: it’s remote and the wonders are hard-won. Salt-water has forced difficult evolution on the “rare plants”: birds that nest on the ground face particular dangers. Trespass and, more fearfully, “death by erosion” threaten the arcadia, its creative freedom and pleasant sense of decline. In the place’s view, sketching, photography and note-making become environmental threats. Practical concerns may replace the artistic. At the climax of his anecdote, Clegg chooses a poetic figure that shows us something extraordinary without appearing to sacrifice precise observation and record-taking. The “mid-distance lime tree” is simply “pulled flat like the loop of a seam / at the fact of a needle”. It’s the agency given to “the fact of a needle” that makes the simile such a powerful one. The needle, with its spare, intense brilliance, then becomes the after-image of the lightning. No flash, we’re told, has been observed. Clegg’s poem, in its fidelity to the event, does exactly what a poem is required to do: it forgets the dead cliche (the flash of lightning) and tells us something new. That incandescent sewing needle, so weirdly bright it imprints the retina through closed eyes, has radically changed the tree, flattened it as if it were a mere stitch of cotton thread. The reader’s inner eye is imprinted, too.

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”. 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. The poem was probably written in April 1930. Among the subsequent small changes he records, Mendelson notes that in Auden’s lover Chester Kallman’s copy of Poems (1934), Auden revised the first line to “Your lunar beauty”, but that this change isn’t made in any further printings. The initials JC appear in Kallman’s copy: the identity of JC is unknown. To a Sparrow should certainly please an admirer of John Clare. It has both the bright earthiness of observation and the political edge. The latter is immediately apparent in the poet’s announcement of solidarity with the bird: “Because you have no fear to mingle / Wings with those of greater part, / So like me …” The internal half-rhyme (“song”/ “single”) dodges around the obvious verb, “sing” – which would be too fanciful for this poem and for this bird-call. Ledwidge can be fairly accused of poeticism in some of his writing. Here, his diction and images are firmly grounded. It is the first poem in a delightful new 12-poem collection, A Map of Love, which Wynn Thomas has edited for the University of Wales Press. The bilingual collection hops across the centuries from Gwilym to the present, and includes stylish linocuts by the artist, Ruth Jên Evans. It would make a good Valentine’s Day gift, and, if you’re Welsh, you’d only be a little late to offer the collection to a loved one in honour of St Dwynwen, the patron saint of love, whose day was celebrated on 25 January.

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”.Alexandrina begins the poem with a moment of dramatic recognition, so that we immediately hear the first of the two voices and recognise the oral nature of the composition. The orality is underlined by the supple free-range rhythmic movement, and the variety of stanza structure and metre. As a poem, The North Wind is a kind of Ode – one with two singers. Perhaps Anne had read Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind (published in 1820) and decided a less compact and formal style than Shelley’s would best embody the North Wind’s declamations, although she may be sounding her own political note when the prisoner commands the wind, “O speak of liberty”. “Liberty” is a term, after all, that implies something more humanly pertinent than the freedom of the mountains. Poetry for Supper is the title poem of Thomas’s 1958 collection. By now he has established his artistic territory and is able to take time off from the gale-whipped hill farms for poetry talk in the cosy inn-parlour. Real or imagined, the conversation has a lively colloquial swing. The “two old poets” clearly feel at home. Confidently, warmly, they mount a version of the argument that fascinates many creative artists – put crudely, the issue of Spontaneity versus Slog.