Have you read ‘Turkey Buzzards’ by Paul Muldoon? It’s in Horse Latitudes and is also accessible online via the Poetry Foundation. Though I have read it many times, it shapeshifts whenever I return to it and I always find something new. The leaps it takes from thought to thought and line to line, within such formal restraints, is masterful. I suppose feasting like a Turkey Buzzard when it comes to reading is the thing – fine, keep half an eye on the ‘just published’ lists, but go explore other vast landscapes and scavenge what discussions may have left or forgotten; pick it all clean.
In my day job I get to share poetry all the time, from Beowulf to Ocean Vuong and much in-between. I’m fortunate to teach across domestic and international curriculums, and sometimes get to hop from Lorca via Chaucer to Agbabi or Szymborska before morning break! Shakespeare, thankfully, is everywhere. Back home, though I might pull a book at random from the shelf, I’ll rarely open it on any old page: I read pamphlets and collections from the beginning (would you start Jane Eyre half way through?) Before sleep or just after waking is my favourite space to be totally in the presence of another’s voice. Being a slow reader helps; a little and often, in-between piles of marking, works for me.
Neil Astley’s Staying Alive series and Duffy & Clarke’s Map and the Clock are anthologies to keep anyone going for years, and in excellent company. Stairs and Whispers, edited by Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka, and Daniel Sluman, is a redefining examination of UK disabled and D/deaf poetics. ‘Selected’ volumes can be helpful places to start when navigating a poet with a large body of work – but they’re always someone else’s ‘best of,’ aren’t they? Returning to collections, if I can get hold of them, allows me to see, hear, and feel poems shore each other up in the way that they were intended to, and to find favourites for myself. If I’ve heard a poet read their own work aloud, it then comes off the page differently too. Have you listened to Ted Hughes read ‘Wind’? By the way, if you’re after a reading list in the never-ending apprenticeship of poetry, the one at the back of Peter Sansom’s Writing Poems is excellent.
I think the poetry of Michael Donaghy is astonishing, and deserves careful attention and rereading. I also tell anyone who will listen to read Sinéad Morrissey; On Balance is one of her masterpieces and a great place to begin (& Selected: Sound Architecture). In different ways, the engineering within their poems reminds me of George Herbert. Michael Longley writes some of the most beautiful lyrical poems I have encountered, and you must hear him read if you can; I especially love Man Lying on a Wall (I envy anyone who gets to read ‘The Bat’ and ‘The Goose’ for the first time), but read everything you can get your hands on. Another guardian of the soul for me is Mary Oliver, who I always turn to when I need a quiet jolt back into my ‘one wild and precious life’. I have explored her selected essays in Upstream with my IB pupils this year; each one is a candle in a dark room.
I always have non-fiction on the go: at the moment it’s Roger Clarke’s Natural History of Ghosts, Jim Meehan’s Bartender Manual, and Isabella Tree’s Wilding. I love being absorbed in subjects. The volumes of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable are treasure troves for free writing, distraction, and all sorts of discoveries. I’m a huge fan of poems that capture and chronicle real lives. Have you read Keith Hutson’s wonderful collection, Baldwin’s Catholic Geese? It’s a tour de force of music hall and variety acts – packed with showstoppers that are penned with masterful form and serious feeling. I also love the voices and excavations of home in the poems of Olivia McCannon, and Liz Berry. Exactly My Own Length and Black Country are collections I return to. As are Hannah Lowe’s Chick and Miriam Nash’s All the Prayers in the House.
Thanks to the talented poet John-Paul Burns, I have discovered the real-deal of both Karen Solie and Louise Glück, who I have been reading (and savouring) with attention. Though others might suggest The Wild Iris, I’d go to Glück’s first four collections to begin with. Solie’s selected, The Living Option, shies away from nothing and gives a sense of what she’s all about. While we’re over the pond, another writer I have been treasuring quietly for the past five years is the Illinois poet Austin Smith. I really think he is one of the finest voices writing now. Almanac and Flyover Country (Princeton) both left me spellbound – Heaney-esque hands in arable land and knotted up in family lore and tragedy. I’m eagerly awaiting his novel, Our Lady of the Farmer, which he says will be about farmer suicides and the 1980s Farm Crisis of the Midwest.
Another fine poet who ought to be read more widely is Mark Hinchliffe, whose The Raven and the Laughing Head (Calder Valley) is full of memorable poems that vault off into extraordinary spaces. He reminds me of the mythical and imaginative range of Peter Redgrove, but fleeting, quieter. If you haven’t read Michael Laskey, Peter Carpenter, or Roy Marshall, then what are you waiting for? Marshall’s collections The Sunbathers and The Great Animator (Shoestring) are both brimming with truth and humanity. Carpenter’s Just Like That and Laskey’s The Man Alone are two excellent selected introductions to their work (smith/doorstop) before heading back to the collections. I love Geoff Hattersley, Ian Duhig, Ian McMillan, and Paul Farley too.
Some seriously strong pamphlets I have enjoyed (by poets I can’t wait to read more of) are: John-Paul Burns, The Minute and the Train (Poetry Salzburg); Charlotte Wetton, I Refuse to Turn into a Hatstand (Calder Valley); Duncan Chambers, Sleeping Through the Moon Landing (4Word); Robbie Burton, Someone Else’s Street (HappenStance); Cynthia Miller, Primers: Volume Two (Nine Arches); and Michelle Penn, Self-Portrait as a Diviner, Failing (Paper Swans).
Books can tether themselves to memories of when and where and how we first encountered them, and relationships with them alter. I was amazed at how detached I felt from any poem in Ariel when I returned to it earlier this year; it’s a collection I devoured as a teenager. Though I know and still think Plath is a fine poet, it’s now her earliest work that interests me most. At the other end of the scale, I remember first reading Man with the Night Sweats into the early hours on the Lumb Bank sofa, and it made me ill. I fainted once on a train at Waterloo, mid-crucifixion in Ruth Padel’s Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth. Browning’s ‘Childe Roland’ and Byron’s ‘Darkness’ have both given me nightmares, whereas Cowper’s ‘Castaway’ and Edwin Morgan’s ‘Cinquevalli’ can pull me out from the darkest places. Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, and Mark Doty can always make me laugh and cry.
Instead of Rizlas, I have mini Post-it page markers stashed in every pocket and drawer; I stick them next to poems I like so I can find them again to reread or use in lessons or workshops with my pupils. It’s interesting to look across my bookshelves for those ears of colour and to learn something of my own preferences. It’s a trail of breadcrumbs that only leads deeper into the forest; the more I read, the more I realise I haven’t read or want to read, etc. I love alternating between centuries in my reading – try Jos Charles’ Feeld alongside John Clare’s manuscript of The Shepherd’s Calendar (the brilliant facing page Carcanet edition lays bare how far Clare’s raw lines were clipped and preened – which for me opened a dialogue with Charles’ conceit of the trans body as a pastoral space). Or try Seán Hewitt’s Tongues of Fire with the C16th Spanish Carmelite, St. John of the Cross (trans. by Willis Barnstone). Or try the Lyrical Ballads next to Heath, Penelope Shuttle & John Greening’s beguiling collaboration in response to the lost lands of Hounslow. Create your own cocktails and see how voices speak to one another.
Sasha Dugdale, David Constantine, and Helen Constantine crafted the beautiful anthology Centres of Cataclysm (celebrating 50 years of Modern Poetry in Translation), which should sit in tatters from overuse in every classroom and home – the notes on poets and translators are particularly revealing for those like me, whose cultures of reading have almost exclusively been through English. Following recent trips to Lisbon, I’ve been getting acquainted with the mind-boggling range of voices in Pessoa. I’ve enjoyed Cristina Viti’s translations of Albanian poet Gëzim Hajdari, and am learning more about the gabay through Clare Pollard’s translations of the Somali poet Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf. Supporting the Stephen Spender Trust team and all its fantastic education projects has brought home how Anglo-centric the British curriculum can be, and how literature-starved our struggling Modern Language courses are forced to be. As SST shows, there is space for dynamic translation in our homes and classrooms, and there is hope: go read the 2019 young prizewinners online* – Middle Welsh, Turkish, Tamil, Bengali, Nepali, Japanese!
If you’re still reading, that’s very kind, but you could be reading poems. Some of my other top-shelf Single Pot Still favourites to curl up with of an evening would have to be Robin Robertson (I started with Slow Air and Swithering), Eavan Boland, John Burnside, Sheenagh Pugh, and U.A. Fanthorpe. My Martini? Dickinson. My Dom Pérignon? Hopkins. La Fée? Selima Hill. My Pisco Sour? Pascale Petit. This would make a good Zoom quiz… I was lucky to have been taught for a short while by the kind and generous poet Jon Stallworthy, who instilled in me a deeper appreciation for Edward Thomas, Gurney, Rosenberg, David Jones and fellow Salopian, Wilfred Owen. I could read them all day. If I were to write an even longer list of poets writing right now whose poems I admire, you’d be here all day. But, here are a few: Mona Arshi, Philip Gross, Kate Miller, Stuart Pickford, Daljit Nagra, Mary Noonan, Ruby Robinson, John Wedgwood Clarke, Fiona Benson, Colette Bryce, Matthew Dickman, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Andrew McMillan, Jonathan Edwards, Nin Andrews, Helen Mort, Jane Commane, Richard Scott, Michael Symmons Roberts, Kaveh Akbar, William Letford, Gregory Leadbetter, Matthew Siegel, Catherine Staples, Jean Tuomey, Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, and Layli Long Soldier…
Right, I’m off to be a Turkey Buzzard and devour some more poems. What’s next on my pile? The wonderful Marvin Thompson’s Road Trip, David Harsent’s Salt, and Peter Fallon’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics. What a treat!
*The Stephen Spender Prize: http://www.stephen-spender.org/spender_prize.html