A Favourite Poet

Of course there are many, but in strict adherence to the brief, I'll make an 'of the moment' choice. The poet I've been reading most often in the last few months is Ruth Padel. I realise some of you may not be familiar with the name, so excuse me those who are while I furnish a few autobiographical details as background.

Ruth Padel was born in London in 1946, the eldest of five siblings, and is a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Her father was a psychoanalyst and classicist who taught his daughter Greek. Ruth studied Greek at Oxford and wrote her Ph.D on ancient Greek poetry. (You can see why I like her already.) She has taught Greek Classics at Oxford, Cambridge, London and Princeton universities and has also studied at the Sorbonne and at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, where she lived for several years. While there, she helped in the excavation of the Royal Palace at Knossos. 

As well as teaching Greek Classics, Ruth has written several critical studies on Ancient Greek literature and how its myths can inform an understanding of the modern human psyche. She is also the author of a couple of novels. I can highly recommend 'Daughters of the Labyrinth', a fictional depiction of the holocaust in Crete after the German invasion in WWII.

In addition to her affiliation to Greece and all things Greek, Ruth also has a love of music. She has sung as a member of various prestigious chamber choirs in England and France and has has taught opera. 

Her third consuming interest is in the natural world (as befits her family lineage from Darwin). She is a keen conservationist, a Fellow of the Zoological Society and a Trustee of London Zoo.

She was the first woman poet to be nominated for the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

All of these consuming passions naturally inform her poetry, of which there are sixteen collections to date. Although in her own words she was "formed by the nineteenth century" in terms of cultural aesthetic and scientific learning, she is a modernist in her writing, and poetry for her is the connective tissue that unites all subjects and disciplines. I find her poetry daring, erudite, imaginative and often downright sexy. 

Ruth Padel

I've heard Ruth Padel read a number of times, and if you wish to do so, there are quite a few recordings out on YouTube. I most recently heard her as a guest poet at the Poetry Society's 2025 National Poetry Competition Winners Night, reading from her latest poetry collection, 'Girl'. The other guest poet was Australia's Debbie Lim and she was excellent too. This year's winner, Fiona Larkin, was judged to have submitted the best poem out of 20,000 entries. Them's the odds, folks. I didn't enter. I don't do competitions.

Obviously I'm going to share one of Ruth Padel's poems this week rather than one of my own. I've chosen my favourite poem from her 1998 collection 'Rembrandt Would Have Loved You'. That collection also includes the poem with which she won the 1996 National Poetry Competition, Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire, but I much prefer this one. I'll make no commentary. Read and enjoy.

Boulangerie

Still Life With Loaves, Seaweed And Wren

   

Whatever self is, I'd like mine to wake up with yours

While sleep is still plumping the skin,

Warm bread rising gently in the oven.

   An enamel oven, opened on a summer morning

In a village in Provence

By a woman who's never been unkind, whose children

And husband and lover have never been hurt.

   It's not that real a place.

I do know that. But for this moment of waking

I'm imagining, it holds

The warmest small patisserie in the world

   Which does its baking in a sloping village street

By the wall of the local château.

Relations with the château have always been brilliant.

There was no need for revolution, there wasn't one.

   It's all been OK, that side of things.

There are baguettes in the baguette corner

As there have been two hundred years

And will go on being, for in this village

   No worlds end. Light pours down the little street

With all promise of a hot day to come

But not yet, not yet. A street in which no girl

Has been ungenerous to her lover,

   No child mown down by alcoholic lorries,

No resistance fighter shot. And no Jew shopped

By neighbours who wanted his farm.

The Cathars and the Huguenots were fine.

   I'm going to reel back history for these bakers,

Map them on the road to Eden. Children will come in

For pain au chocolat and get it free.

Parents will come

   For newspapers, milk and a gossip

Which never knifes anyone in the back, not really,

And sun will spread through the doorway

Without alarming the profiteroles,

   Their glisten of chocolate, that delicate cream.

This stove is Delphi, navel of the world,

There's you and me in it, and maybe some other

Lucky loaves, expanding their crusts

   For the day to mutter 'We're together, it's OK'.

And if other sorts of loaf, seedcake or sparbunkle,

Think it all sounds pretty boring lying there -

Loom-weights in a loaf-museum, none of the mica-sparkle

   Of the scythe - they can fuck off elsewhere.

For whatever self is, I'd like mine to wake with yours,

Curls mixing on the pillow surprised - as if, seconds before,

The separate hairs weren't calcium and follicles

   But sweeping off on some quite different enterprise

Of being. Maybe hair dreams of being dandelion seed

Blown over rivers, gold forests, the motorway du sol.

These curls of ours can do that. Let them go helium-ballooning,

   Linked very lightly, as far as they want.

Or maybe they'd like to be seaweed

At the bottom of an East Aegean bay, swaying their tips

In sky-water whose ripples you can't see, only feel,

   A virtual reality of movement that gets the weeds excited

Very gently. A pure bit of sea, naturellement,

None of your oil slicks and rubbish from foreign yachts.

Yes, if the hairs want to have been that, they can,

   Then be glad to come back to us, as we wake

In this bakery whose warmth is not electronic but self-made.

The loaves created it. They'd like to stay all day

Half-dreaming they are apples in a loft, radiating Cézanne,

   Dapple-lit by a window so old it is ouzo,

Quite certain no roof will ever fall. No one visits them

Except a child, who'll remember all her life

The smell, the soft still light with dust along its spine,

   The silent, consenting apples.

Yet whatever selves are, I'd like mine to wake

And not only dream

With yours. Be risen loaves, not fixing to get eaten

   But to get their act together.

Loaves that are going to give themselves names

And float out into the world

Looking like people who get phoned up,

   Arrange meetings and deadlines, difficult lunches.

They'll be separate loaves paying their own bills

But all day in their soft loaf parts

Keep a patch of themselves away

   Where they woke up touching -

As a wren, I imagine, keeps the impress of eggs

Left hidden in her penny-size nest

When she darts out shopping, through the teeth

   Of hawthorn, for her list of things she needs.

Mayfly. Lacewing. And there they stay,

Those six-millimetre ovals, pressed

In the faint fawn-feather of her breast.

   No harm's coming to her eggs,

Nothing broken or planning to break. No need for a wren

To say sorry, or suffer anything but the warm spark 

Of morning, dawn-hunts among buds of Russian vine

   For that greenfly tickle on her tiny wren tongue

And the mercy of having woken touching

What she loves. Whatever love is for a wren.

And whatever self is, I'd like yours to wake,

   If it wouldn't mind, with mine.

                                                 Ruth Padel

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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A Favourite Poet

Right away, I’m struggling with the brief. Perusing the collections in my bookcase I can possibly narrow it down to five. Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin, Sharon Olds, Robert Hass, Michael Donaghy, and that’s just the ones on the top shelf. Truth be told there’s not many poets I dislike, and those I do are mostly contemporaries. For those versifiers I love are either well-established or dead. Many of in which I found by chance, in anthologies like Bloodaxe’s Being Human for instance, or the Penguin Book of American Verse, all of which has led me to some wonderful finds (with the exception of Larkin all of the poets mentioned above). 

If I ever feel my poetic soul is lacking, and the muse is missing, I return to these anthologies. My go to favourite being Contemporary American Poetry edited by A.Poulin and Michael Waters. A book dating from the early nineties. My own copy which is missing a cover and defaced in marginalia is beside me currently. Each and everyone of the seventy poets included have one time or another been my favourite.

I open the book at random to rediscover a gem, C.K. Williams. An American poet who died in 2015 is the eponymous master of the long line, with a standard line being between twelve to twenty syllables. Verging on the prosaic, Williams is a plain spoken philosopher in disguise (an oxymoron I know). In the vein of his namesake and fellow New Jerseyan native William Carlos Williams his voice is simple, his poems plenty, and every inch of his stylistic voice is permeated with the tint of dread: “They are poured into the earth / like nails; move an inch, / they are driven down again. / The earth is sore with them.” 

C. K. Williams

Williams' biggest theme is suffering, especially from those outliers of society: the homeless, the dispossessed etc. He explores their plight, but shy’s away from pontificating. He is a philosopher without a system, merely content just to tell us a story. I get my narrative drive from him. 

There’s no single anthologised poem Williams is known by (maybe The Gas Station). My personal favourite being the poem She, Though from his 1993 collection Some of The Forms Of Jealousy, a twelve page epic, about a pseudo artist, and the couple they attach themselves too. It’s a poem about inspiration and sacrifice and off course jealousy. It reminds me of another blissfully bleak story in Michael Donaghy’s poem Black Ice And Rain. 

There’s nothing I can take out of context from She, Though without wrecking it, so I’m going to close my eyes turn a page and bring down my finger: 

'I’d believed that art was everything, the final resolution of all my insecu-

                rity and strivings. 

Now I realised that in attempting to create a character in art, someone who 

                would live for art, 

I’d turned away from something in myself, some lapse I hadn’t glimpsed, 

                and, more shocking still, 

I knew that architecture, poetry, and painting weren’t the self-containing 

                glories I’d imagined, 

but that they, too, could have evasions lurking in them, grievous cosmic 

                flinching from reality. 

Art wasn’t everything, nothing could be everything, but more crucially, 

                art needed you:' 

Needing art, I flip the book to another favourite.

Jamie.

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A Favourite Poet

On the road next to Preston Station and about eight minutes from my house is a blue plaque to the poet who was born there on the 6th January 1874 and was certainly a favourite of quite a few folk. Which is a bit of an understatement as Robert Service became the highest earning poet of all time and it is claimed the most widely read poet of the Twentieth Century. A single poem ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ earned him half a million pounds alone. Charles Lindbergh allowed himself a book of Service’s poems as luggage on his flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St Louis.

To be honest he didn’t stay in Preston long as his family moved to Scotland when he was a boy and he himself emigrated to Vancouver in 1896. He wrote ‘Here I am, a traveller – I who was destined to be a stay-at-home. By my own will I have achieved this’. It was here he would eventually launch his writing career, but not before seeking some more adventure.

Robert William Service

Robert headed to Los Angeles where he found work as a labourer, digging a mountain tunnel. He drifted from one job to the next, filling in as a saloon dishwasher, orange picker, sandwich board worker, even as a handyman in a brothel. He wandered with a rucksack and guitar in hand, a guitar given to him by the girls in the brothel, barely getting by. Once the wandering lifestyle began to lose its lustre, he returned to Vancouver.

He eventually settled down and began working for the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Victoria in 1903. He was then transferred to the Yukon Territory where he began writing poems about the Klondike Gold Rush that derived from people he met and the stories they told as well as his own treks into the wilderness.

In 1907 after having collected enough poems for a book, Service sent the poems to his father, who had emigrated to Toronto, and asked him to find a printing house so they could make it into a booklet. He enclosed a cheque to cover the costs and intended to give these booklets away to his friends in Whitehorse for Christmas. His father took the manuscript to William Briggs in Toronto, whose employees loved the book. The foreman and printers recited the ballads while they worked. A salesman read the proofs out loud as they came off the typesetting machines. An enterprising salesman sold 1700 copies in advance orders. The publisher sent Robert's cheque back to him and offered a ten percent royalty contract for the book. That was a good move as it has sold over three million copies to date.

In June 1913, he married Parisienne Germaine Bourgoin and when the First World War broke out and was refused enlistment due to varicose veins. Instead he became a war correspondent and served for 2 years as an ambulance driver on the front lines. They continued to travel and he continued to write during the interwar years.

Robert and Germaine (and cat)

At the start of the Second World War he moved his family to the safety of America’s West Coast and Hollywood had him join with other celebrities in helping the morale of troops – visiting US Army camps to recite his poems. He was also asked to play himself in the movie … The Spoilers, working alongside Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne. At the war’s end he returned to France where he enjoyed the friendship of the rich and famous. On the marriage of the Hollywood actress Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco, Service wrote a special poem for the couple as his wedding gift.

In the Autumn of 1958 while staying at his villa in Brittany, Robert Service contracted flu and he passed away at the age of 84. His beloved wife survived him until 1989 when she died aged 102.

Service was honoured on a Canadian postage stamp in 1976, there is a mountain on the Alaska Canada Border Range named after him as well as schools bearing his name.

The Shooting of Dan McGrew

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.
Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do,
And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou.

His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars.

And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans,
But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;
For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;
But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman's love —
A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true —
(God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, — the lady that's known as Lou.)

Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil's lie;
That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die.
'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair, and it thrilled you through and through —
"I guess I'll make it a spread misere", said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

The music almost died away ... then it burst like a pent-up flood;
And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood.
The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,
And the lust awoke to kill, to kill ... then the music stopped with a crash,
And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm,
And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true,
That one of you is a hound of hell. . .and that one is Dan McGrew."

Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark,
And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark.
Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that's known as Lou.

These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know.
They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch," and I'm not denying it's so.
I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two —
The woman that kissed him and — pinched his poke — was the lady that's known as Lou.

                                                                                                          Robert Service

Thanks for reading, Terry Q

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A Favourite Poet - Too Many to Mention

Poetry books are in abundance on my book shelves and bedside table. I love poetry. I love words, artistically shaped into meaningful phrases. I wish I had the talent to do it better and I keep trying, but I think I peaked some time ago. My head is packed with stress and nonsense which I hope will eventually spill out and evaporate, giving me back some clarity and concentration, and something to write about.

As for choosing or having a favourite poet, for me, it’s like music and depends how I feel. They all have a place.

I suppose we all start as children, learning nursery rhymes and progress into poetry from there. My first poetry book must have been A Children’s Garden of Verse by Walter de la Mare. It’s a slim, hardback, well-used and dog-eared, still knocking around my house somewhere amongst my saved children’s books. I enjoy sharing books with the children at school. I often choose something that tells the story in rhyme, like Dr Seuss and ask the class if anyone can guess what word is next. I like to make it fun. I’ve borrowed a poetry book for children by Michael Rosen which my elder grandson enjoyed. I recently introduced him to my poem about Blackpool Tower, written a few years ago. He was arguing about when it was built, how long it took and I couldn’t convince him that it was less than a hundred years, so out came the book with the poem in it. I read the poem out aloud, not letting on that I’d written it until the end, when I showed him the name. Now he knows that I’m a published poet, I might have gone up in his estimation. I’m not just Nanna, who makes delicious muffins.

When I was a child, we had to learn poems or verses off by heart. It was part of English and usually set as homework to recite to the class. No escape. Here’s a favourite,

From Home-thoughts From Abroad by Robert Browning.

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!

Later it was Shakespeare’s sonnets and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath from the Canterbury Tales.

My fondness for Dumfries & Galloway began with a visit to the birthplace of Robert Burns when we were on holiday near Ayr. Our first stay in the area was never going to be enough and over the years we may have traced his steps from Alloway to Ecclefechan and back again many times, visiting his various homes and his resting place in Dumfries. I wrote this some time ago,

You captured my heart with your words of romance,
I would have embraced you, if given the chance.
We might have been lovers and perfect soul mates,
What a shame I was born two centuries late.

John Betjeman, Simon Armitage, Maya Angelou and Lemn Sissay are all dear to me. How wonderful to see the work of Lemn Sissay displayed as artwork on the side of a Huddersfield University wall, and another in Manchester. We haven’t met, but I feel like I know him through his life story and his daily quatrains, and I want to hug him and say, “Look, at that! Look how far you’ve come!”

I have met Manchester poet, Mike Garry. His poetry still takes my breath away and I’ve seen him many times. The first time was 2012 at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal when he was on with John Cooper Clarke. Mike Garry, totally different to JCC, with an equal talent that blew me away. Read him, go and see him, listen to him on YouTube.

Dr John Cooper Clarke, he’s gone from strength to strength. Punk poet in the 1970s to GCSE and A-Level Curriculum inclusion now. Clever, witty and great in concert, with all his handwritten poetry on loose sheets of paper. That’s how it was in Kendal. I wonder if he ever got my Terza Rima?

When Manchester became Mad-chester.

Those of the time embraced every word,
Listening in wonder to John Cooper Clarke,
The Bard of Salford who had to be heard.

Rapid from the mouth and skinny and dark,
‘Evidently Chickentown’, effing good,
He’s magic with words, bright as any spark.

His wholesome description meant that we could
Smell the inhabitants of ‘Beezley Street’,
Rich mixture of urban decay and blood.

Life, humour and truth, a picture complete
And painted with colourful language that
Reaches all listeners not just the elite.

So thanks, JCC, I know where I’m at,
Laughing out loud at the poem called ‘Twat’.

PMW 2012

I haven’t got a definite favourite. I’ve missed lots out and there are people I know through open-mic and similar formats who write some terrific poetry and make me want to snap all my pencils.

This is a long blog, but thanks for reading, Pam x

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