Pleasure, pain and poetry

'When we dance, angels will run and hide their wings' - Sting, When we Dance

When I was a girl I happened across Contemporary British & North American Verse, an anthology edited by Martin Booth, nestling amongst the crime and romances on my aunt's bookshelf.

In the wilds of Africa poetry isn't exactly encouraged as an outlet for expressing oneself, so I'm not sure where it came from, but there it was. Pristine and on the shelf. Left behind by someone's lover, maybe? Someone with a wider life?

Sure, we did poetry in school. Lots of Shakespeare, some Christina Rossetti, classics. Nothing contemporary. I think there was too much sex in contemporary verse for it to be allowed...

When I found this book I was surprised at the intensity of the language. I was astonished that contemporary song lyrics could be considered poetry.

I still have the book, which travelled with me through two marriages and four countries. I re-read it occasionally. I like poetry. I like it more when it's obscure. I like discovering things I think nobody knows about until I find that everyone does and I'm just late to the party.

Old favourites jump out at me.

Richard Brautigan's On the Elevator Going Down and Douglas Dunn's Young Women in Rollers. Ted Hughes' Bedtime Story and The Tractor. Brian Patten's A Blade of Grass. A Blade of Grass was the first real love poem I ever read that made sense, and it's still the poem I think of when I think of romantic love.

Of course, Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning is in there, and some Sylvia Plath, which I hurriedly skip over. There should be no Bee Boxes in my life.

Peter Redgrove's A Storm alarms me now, just as it did then.

He says:

Somebody is throttling that tree
By the way it's threshing about;
I'm glad it's no one I know, or me,
The head thrust back at the throat,

Green hair tumbled and cracking throat,

His thumbs drive into her windpipe,
She cannot cry out,
Only swishing and groaning: death swells ripe.

The light is dimming but the fight goes on.
Chips strike my window. In the morning, there
Stands the tree, still, bushy and calm,
Not as I saw it, twisted heel to ear.

But fluffed up, boughs chafing slightly.
What's become of her attacker?
I'm glad he's not mine or known to me,
Flipped to the ground, heel over ear:

She preens herself, with a soft bough-purr
Was he swallowed up, lip over ear?
He's gone anyway. The path is thick in her fur.
Am I a friend, may I walk near?

I find some pressed rose petals in my book from my very first love affair. They've faded to a deep brown, like a blood stain, and the colour has dissipated murkily into the surrounding pages. I can't remember who gave me this rose, but I must have loved him. For I kept its petals after it died.

Jeanette Winterson has a column on poetry critique on her website. She has reproduced some of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry. I've just added Rapture to my reading list.

Surely the rest of the collection can't be as good as this:

Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head.
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

--- You, Carol Ann Duffy