moonbeam
Senior Member
since 12-24-2005
Posts 1808
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5 posted 09-20-2006 05:52 AM
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Humm, you ARE taking notice of my posts aren’t you! I shall have to be careful what I say. Heh.
Ted Hughes is one of my favourite poets, but curiously also one of my least favourite. At his best he is IMO almost unbeatable (but them I’m biassed towards poems using natural imagery and metaphor), at his worst as with the Crow poems and Birthday Letters and other even weirder stuff (probably Plath’s influence), he is simply awful.
Thought Fox is possibly one of his most accessible and well known. The Jaguar is also one of my favourite:
http://members.tripod.com/poetry_pearls/ePoets/Hughes.htm
as is The Horses
http://www.ouce.ox.ac.uk/~rwashing/research/twos/poems.html
but all his poems that seek to make a comment upon our human existence by using the animal and natural world in sometimes quite complex metaphors are pretty wonderful. He’s certainly had a big influence on my writing.
Another poet you might quite like, judging by what you write, is a poet from Fife, Scotland - John Burnside.
I’m going to risk posting one of his here because they are a bit difficult to find on the web.
Agoraphobia
John Burnside
My whole world is all you refuse:
a black light, angelic and cold
on the path to the orchard,
fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing,
little owls snagged in the fruit nets
out by the wire
and the sense of another life, that persists
when I go out into the yard
and the cattle stand round me, obstinate and dumb.
All afternoon, I've worked at the edge of your vision,
mending fences, marking out our bounds.
Now it is dusk, I turn back to the house
and catch you, like the pale Eurydice
of children's classics, venturing a glance
at nothing, at this washed infinity
of birchwoods and sky and the wet streets leading away
to all you forget: the otherworld, lucid and cold
with floodlights and passing trains and the noise of traffic
and nothing like the map you sometimes
study for its empty bridlepaths,
its hill-tracks and lanes and roads winding down to a coast
of narrow harbors, lit against the sea.
~~~~~
I hope you liked that.
I did e-mail you but I had to use my wife’s webmail as I hadn’t set up an addy. I’ve given it to several people at PIP now and she’s taking a dim view of her inbox being filled up. So I set up my own webmail - I’ll try sending you another mail right now from it.
M
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