|
|
 |
| |
Tom Paulin, the Irish poet and reviewer |
Poems to be sipped slowly like the very best champagne
THIS book by Tom Paulin, the Irish poet and reviewer for many years on BBC2’s Newsnight Review, provides us with a deep engagement with 47 poems intended for students and poetry addicts like myself, from West Hampstead to Tipperary.
The poets range from Anon and George Herbert – two of my favourites – to three of Tom’s Irish buddies, John Montague, Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney, with Oxford academic buddy Craig Raine thrown in at the end.
Out of the 47 poems, 45 are by men poets and only two by women – Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti.
Yet I prefer it to Ruth Padel’s most recent The Poem and the Journey: 60 Poems for the Journey of Life (Vintage £8.99). Of the 60 poems there, 32 are by men poets and 28 by women.
Ruth Padel writes like a teacher buzzing away on a series of highs. The Poem and the Journey is worth buying for what she has to say with such genuine enthusiasm about one poem alone, Rosemary Tonks’s “Badly Chosen Lover”, from “Iliad of Broken Sentences”. Rosemary disappeared from her home in Downshire Hill, Hampstead, in the early 1970s, deeply disappointed in general by the London literary life, and by the vacuousness of most literary editors in particular. Now Faber and Bloodaxe want to publish her Collected Poems, but cannot until she resurfaces.
Tom Paulin’s The Secret Life of Poems: A Poetry Primer is worth buying for what he has to say about one poem alone, Emily Dickinson’s “He fumbles at your Soul’’.
I quote it in its entirety:
He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys
Before they drop full Music on –
He stuns you by degrees –
Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers – further heard –
Then nearer – Then so slow
Your Breath has time to straighten –
You Brain – to bubble Cool –
Deals – One – imperial – thunderbolt –
That scalps your naked Soul –
When Winds take Forests in the Paws –
The Universe – is still –
Beg, borrow or steal his book to mull over at length what Tom has to say about this one poem.
This is a book above all else that cannot be rushed. Each of the 47 poems needs to be sipped slowly like the very finest champagne.
The Secret Life of Poems is transparently his bid for posterity. It is all the better for being exquisitely well written, as well as politically incorrect.
JOHN HORDER
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
