Poems

Friday

Michael Gove

Q&A: Boris, Cameron or May? Plus, our most left-wing beliefs revealed

From our UK edition

35 min listen

To submit your urgent questions to Michael and Maddie, go to: spectator.co.uk/quiteright This week on the first ever Quite right! Q&A: What’s your most left-wing belief? Michael & Maddie confess their guilty liberal secrets on the Elgin Marbles, prison reform and private equity – or ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. Also this week: who would you trust to save your life on a desert island – Boris Johnson, Theresa May or David Cameron? And finally, a literary turn: from John Donne to Thomas Hardy, Michael and Maddie share their favourite poems, and make the case for learning verse by heart. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Orlando Reade: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost

From our UK edition

36 min listen

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Orlando Reade, whose book What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost describes the life and afterlife of one of the greatest poems in the language. Orlando tells me how Milton’s epic has been read with – and against – the grain over the centuries; how it went from being a totem of English exceptionalism to being an encouragement to postcolonial revolutionaries and political thinkers from Malcolm X to C. L. R. James; how the modernists wrestled with Milton… and how Jordan Peterson gets it wrong.

Tuesday

Emily Rhodes

Notes on the natural world: an exquisite collection from Kathleen Jamie

From our UK edition

‘Let me leave Cairn here as a trail marker, a moment noted, a view from the strange here-and-now,’ Kathleen Jamie states towards the end of the prologue to her exquisite new collection of writings. In more than 40 micro-essays and poems, her keen-eyed view encompasses both an uninhabited island far out at sea and a piece of flint in her hand; it accommodates surfacing memories and also peers into the uncertain future awaiting the next generation. A balanced tower of ultra-short pieces is a new form for Jamie, the Scottish makar (or national poet), who also pens longer pieces of nature writing, collected into the genre-expanding works: Findings, Sightlines and Surfacing.

Wednesday

Barnaby Rogerson

Waging war through poetry

Poetry is politics in the Yemen. When the last imam of Yemen, who was also the hereditary ruler, was deposed in a coup in 1962, it was a local poet who announced the change of regime on the radio, in verse of course. And the current al-Houthi regime in the north of the country, like all its predecessors, asserts its legitimacy, confounds its enemies and rallies its supporters through poetry. As an aspect of their cause, they have consciously avoided high-Arabic poetry — a literate, urban cultural form — and have made use of the zamil tradition, which immediately speaks not of the palaces of emirs and princes, but takes the listener to sit beside the farmers and Bedouin shepherds in the villages and hills.

poetry

Monday

Daniel Swift

How Wilfred Owen became a poet

Here is the opening of a sonnet written by Wilfred Owen in the spring of 1911: “Three colors have I known the Deep to wear;/ ’Tis well today that Purple grandeurs gloom.” Owen was eighteen and had just been on a pilgrimage to Teignmouth in England, where his hero John Keats had once stayed. The kindest thing to say about this poem is that it is heavy with the influence of Keats. Six years later, in a seaside hotel requisitioned by the army and waiting to be sent back to the Western Front, he begins a poem like this: “Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell.” This looks so simple. The monosyllables carry the meter without fuss; “shell” here means both munitions and protection.

Owen

Friday

Francesca Peacock

Ocean Vuong’s immature poetry

Time is a Mother — Ocean Vuong’s second poetry collection — should have been a scene-stealer, a much-awaited literary event of the type normally reserved for a J.K. Rowling. The collection has been talked about in the breathy, excited terms not normally associated with poetry — the least glitzy of the literary genres — and in a way not heard of since the blockbuster release of Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998). Vuong, rightly, won the T.S. Eliot prize in 2017 with Night Sky With Exit Wounds. The collection had flashes of brilliance and was a mark of a young poet making his way in the world. It also won the Forward Prize for best first collection, and, in 2019, Vuong was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant.