Hello! I’m Amanda Brown and I am taking over the Books At Bibby Line blog from Mark Till. This is an extremely hard act to follow: I have found Mark’s choice of text consistently stimulating, while his comments have been both illuminating and great fun. Undaunted, I am very much looking [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Poem of the Week’
December 4, 2009
Poem of the Week
Christmas, we can no longer ignore or deny it, is coming. The goose is beginning to look a little on the chubby side. And I’m actually rather excited! I thought I’d begin festivities with John Betjeman and his take on Advent in 1955. Even then, he was worried that the true spirit of Christmas was [...]
November 27, 2009
Poem of the Week
The poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889) said simple things in strange ways and so made them seem fabulous. The first few lines of this, ‘The Windhover’, one of his best known poems, are almost a tongue-twister. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what in the name of Christ (ho ho) he’s trying to say: I’ve written [...]
November 20, 2009
There’s Water on the Moon (Poems of the Week)
Last week NASA announced that its mission to smash a rocket into a large crater at the lunar south pole, hoping to kick up ice, had been a success. There’s water on the Moon. And not just a bit: “significant amounts”. Scientists who studied the data say instruments trained on the impact plume saw “copious [...]
November 13, 2009
Poem of the Week
I don’t know about you, but seeing old photographs, while often funny and sometimes fascinating, always makes me feel sad. My Grandad as a ten-year-old boy, his whole life undecided, a look of profound mischief on his early, unworn face… My Mum’s twenty-first birthday party, lots of laughing, everything somehow more simple… Holiday snaps from childhood… Even quite recent, digital images. How much things change in [...]
November 6, 2009
Poem of the Week
Today’s comes from the enigmatic and reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886). Her poems are always short but rarely simple, punctuated by strange dashes instead of commas or full-stops, and manage to cram, TARDIS-like, so much thought into so few words. See what you think of this one.
‘Hope is the thing with feathers’
Hope is the thing with feathers —
That [...]
October 29, 2009
(Spooky) Poem of the (Hallowe’en) Week
Let there be a spice of terror! Of dark skies and evil things!
To celebrate this weekend of pumpkins, costumes and gaudy ghoulishness, I’ve chosen as today’s poem ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe. It’s tricky to read out loud – with all of its rhymes, inner-rhymes and tongue-twisting alliterations – but also, if you’ll forgive me, a real treat. So give it [...]
October 23, 2009
Poem of the Week
Today’s poem is a great example of how, while culture and custom and language may change over time, human feelings remain the same. Love is the same. Pain is the same. Longing is the same. It was written four hundred years ago, but now, as you read the words Philip Sidney wrote, it’s like you’ve time-travelled back inside his [...]
October 16, 2009
Poem of the Week
It is ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … the spirit of a spiritless situation’. Karl Marx was writing about religion, but it could’ve been poetry.
Today’s poem is a protest, a small human gesture of defiance. It was written by the classical scholar A. E. Housman shortly after the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for [...]
October 9, 2009
Poem of the Week
As yesterday’s post about National Poetry Day already includes a selection of great poems (chosen by members of The Reader Organisation: do scroll down and enjoy them), I thought I’d take the chance to do something a little different.
Today’s Poem of the Week is ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ (words by Alan and Marilyn Bergman) [...]
