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

I once had the pleasure of having a poem I had written directed, and recorded by, the brilliant director-actor Fiona Shaw . Or rather, it was a treat but also a shocker. For Ms Shaw spent an hour trying to wrest a performance from my reading of my own work to get to the heart of the matter - a kernel of truth she sensed I could not quite hit with my voice, my vocal performance. Finally, in something akin to desperation, she admitted that actors, for her, were far better readers of poems than the poets themselves.  In fact, she confided, if actors did poetry readings more often, people might actually enjoy poetry. Such a viewpoint is partly behind today's event in British radio broadcasting - a New Year's Day special seeing Jeremy Irons (that immortal ham, best-beloved for Brideshead Revisited and Die Hard 4 or whatever ) - reading ALL OF TS ELIOT'S POETRY (!) over the course of the day, on BBC Radio 4 - directed by, you guessed it, Fiona Shaw. Meanwhile, it must be sai...

TERENCE TILLER’S LOVELY SHAPES OF RHETORIC : AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS COLLECTED POEMS   Terence Tiller died in 1987, in December; 29 years later this autumn his Collected Poems is to appear, on his centenary. His poems, often explorations of love and desire, and often set in Egypt during World War II, are almost the poetic equivalent of the Bogart-Bergman film Casablanca . Tiller, who is more or less a forgotten figure now, published three volumes with the New Hogarth Library in the Forties. Poems was the first of these, from 1941; his second was The Inward Animal , from 1943. His Third, Unarm, Eros , from 1947, completes a trilogy of wartime poetry arguably unequalled for its extravagant lyric modernism. One of the few contemporary critics to write on Tiller is Andrew Duncan, who emphasizes the sensitivity and sensuousness of mid-century poetry, especially Tiller’s. Tiller ‘seems to have devoted much time to writing poetry which was sexy and romantic’. [1] Duncan al...