The Sabbath / W.H. Auden
Some pungent Wystan in this moment when it's hard to remain very positive about humanity's inherent goodness. It's such a lapidary poem....
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Alistair Appleton
- Sep 13
- 1 min
The Road Home / Gillian Allnutt
Gillian Allnutt is a British poet from the Northeast of the country and the recipient of the Queen's Prize for poetry. This poem is from...
456 views5 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Sep 5
- 2 min
To Autumn / John Keats
Just in case you think I don't like any poetry before 1920, here is the sumptuous "Ode to Autumn" by Keats. Familiar as it is, it's...
389 views5 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Aug 23
- 1 min
A False Awakening /John Burnside
I stumbled across this delicious poem in the London Review of Books (which is my only source of news these days). Burnside is a Scottish...
556 views5 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Jun 6
- 3 min
Sometimes A Wild God/ Tom Hirons
Something a little different. A long rollicking carnivalesque of a poem from Tom Hirons, a writer and mask-maker from Dartmoor. (The...
437 views14 comments
Alistair Appleton
- May 6
- 2 min
Coal Sarcophagus/William Haas
I don't usually care for prose-poems but there are, of course, some masterpieces. (Rimbaud, par example). But I have been really enjoying...
266 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Apr 19
- 2 min
Apertura d'ali (Wingspan) / Bartolo Cattafi
Cattafi was one of the generation of post-war Italian poets I was inspired to read at university in the 1980s. He lived through the...
233 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Apr 10
- 2 min
Moment / Wisława Szymborska
translated from Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh This beautiful poem was suggested by Mindsprings regular Mechteld-Hanna...
246 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Mar 15
- 2 min
The Fish / Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore is one of the greats of American modernism. Friend of TS Eliot and one of the most distinctive voices of the age. And this...
218 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Feb 21
- 2 min
Homage to Mistress Bradstreet / John Berryman
Since we're nearing Mother's Day I thought I'd post this extraordinary section of John Berryman's 1953 sequence. Ann Bradstreet was the...
245 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Feb 8
- 2 min
'December 18th' / Anne Sexton
So here's a muscular, sexy poem from Anne Sexton for the beginning of Spring. It's the last poem in her 1969 sequence "Eighteen Days...
441 views8 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Dec 15, 2022
- 2 min
Again in the Black Cloud / J.H. Prynne
I finally feel inspired to post a poem from one of my favourite poets of all time, Jeremy Prynne. I've written about my fascination with...
386 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Nov 27, 2022
- 1 min
Love / Czesław Miłosz
I've had Miłosz' Collected poems sitting on my shelf for decades and just fished that out this evening. He was writing this poem in the...
352 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Nov 2, 2022
- 1 min
A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford/ Derek Mahon
This poem by Mahon is a miracle. A shed in Ireland, abandoned during the Civil War in the 1920s, has been home for fifty years to a...
473 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Oct 18, 2022
- 2 min
A Bird In the House / Robin Blaser
This poem, by the modernist San Francisco poet, Robin Blaser is the source of the word "otherous" (in the very first line) which we...
277 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Sep 5, 2022
- 1 min
Paul Hoover / House of Cedar, Rafters of Fir
Hoover is not a poet I’m familiar with but another that I discovered on the excellent Poetry Foundation app. He is riffing on the imagery...
194 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Aug 15, 2022
- 2 min
From "Out on the lawn, I lie in bed" / WH Auden
A very Audenesque Auden poem from 1933 that undercuts the dreamy, chummy pastoral of the first few stanzas with an unsettling meditation...
849 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Aug 2, 2022
- 1 min
From “Tintern Abbey” / William Wordsworth
I loved Wordsworth when I studied him as a Romantic teenager at school. And then was rather abashed in the very postmodern University...
217 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Jul 19, 2022
- 1 min
The Cold Heaven / WB Yeats
On a very hot week in the UK, here is a deliciously cold poem. One of my favourites from Yeats, it is filled with dazzling phrases -...
267 views8 comments
Alistair Appleton
- Jul 12, 2022
- 1 min
Adlestrop / Edward Thomas
Kirsty and I were travelling back from Holy Isle, crossing Scotland from Glasgow to Edinburgh on the train. We were talking poems. And we...
202 views2 comments
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