New Poem by Sheenagh Pugh

Eyewear is celebrating its 5th birthday by featuring surprise appearances by poets gifting the blog with new poems. I am very pleased to start the week with a new poem by Sheenagh Pugh. Her collection of poetry, Stonelight (1999) won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2000. She has twice won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Her collection of poetry The Beautiful Lie (Seren, 2002) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the collection The Movement of Bodies (Seren, 2005) was selected as a Poetry Book Society recommendation and also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.

Living In A Snow Globe

Not so much a white-out

as a white-in, a dense swirl,

flinders idling, spinning out the fall,

filling the eye's field, muffling

all sound beyond a circle shrinking

to the point where you stand, slowly

turning, thinking you might be

living in a snow globe, a glass

curve that distorts and distances

the outside, the small silenced township,

while, this side of the wall, a whole landscape

turns upside down around one figure

fixed in a shaking flux and unsure

where here is, or how to get out.

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Search This Blog