Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

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Despite the heat of all this, Crane keeps his founding imagery under control. Mirroring has been extended to repeated sacrificial action. The silence of the mirror seems sharpened by the new term, “unwhispering”. The mirror’s power of silence remains crucial and again there’s an impression that it isn’t entirely trustworthy. This is all a matter of belief rather than fact. Though Roberts's aim is far from merely descriptive, she succeeds in producing one of the most full and multi-faceted evocations of the second world war to be found in English-language poetry. At first glance, the poem looks formal. It might be a 20th-century Elizabethan song, with verses cut to a regular length. Only they’re not: the first verse has seven lines, the second eight, the third nine – two odd numbers bookending an even one. It’s as if even at the most basic level of form, there’d been a decision both to reflect stasis – the immutable “lunar beauty”– and the movement of time. In the crucial line in verse two, “time is inches”, and one might add that time is also the pulse of the poem, the dimeter rhythm carrying the thought from line to line, the sonic pattern of assertions and echoes.

Stone’s prompt, the editorial call-out for poems on “seconds”, coincided with her interest in a concept that apparently preceded the introduction of street lighting. She explains: “I was aware from a poem I wrote about Pepys that in the 18th century it was common for people to conduct all sorts of business, in and out of the bedroom, in the intervals between sleeps. As an accomplished insomniac, I have plenty of experience of night-time lucidity, and I have observed that the majority of my most vivid dreams happen in the pre-dawn slice of somnolence. I wrote this poem in the aftermath of my mother dying, just after Christmas 2021, which coincided with me getting Covid, which is still with me in its postviral state, and produces a lot of very weird mental processes and sleep issues, among other things.” For Hannah Stone’s narrator, the second sleep is a haunt of deeper nightmare, and the dream she recounts evokes an involuntary dash at an uncontrollable and fatal pace. The “bruised psyche” is strapped on a hurdle, being dragged along by galloping horses driven by the dead. One of the definitions of “hurdle”, and the most relevant to this nightmare, is “a frame or sled formerly used in England for dragging traitors to execution”. The poet’s “sweet impudence” is apparent in the generally colloquial diction, but above all in his choice of double- or triple- word rhymes: “end go”/ “window”, “rude as you”/ “nude as you”. A joyful list of the sparrow’s faults in verse four is purposely unconvincing, especially when he repeats himself in “sweetly rude”. His poem, Le Crapaud, an inverted sonnet, has its own sour fun with voice and tone, but Forshaw goes further, seizing the opportunity for a rich brew of English and American-English slang, with terms such as “gob”, “dekko”, “buggered off”, “old toady-boyo”, clobbering the ear with melancholy-merry gusto.

Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes award and was joint winner of the inaugural Roehampton poetry prize. As Satymurti said, the Mahabharata is fundamentally concerned with “questions of the moral life in action”. This concern impels her own recent collection The Hopeful Hat, the universe of moral action being transposed to a smaller contemporary arena than that of Krishna and Arjuna. The collection reflects as well the imaginative expansion in Satyamurti’s writing when her cancer diagnosis was followed by a laryngectomy and the removal of part of her tongue. The need for “voicing the void” still brings moral obligations but there is plenty of hard-edged realism, and a dash of irreverent humour in the approach.

Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build

Meanwhile, a protective circle is drawn round the beauty of the lover, sealing it from censure, shame, regret. In the transcendent moment of adoration, Eros may be a transgression, and the last four lines, part incantation, part blessing, command love not to “near / the sweetness here”. As at the beginning of the poem, the “lunar beauty” exemplifies only itself. This was the layering of the mists. And God not seeing what was under his foot Called this the second day.

The title of this week’s poem anticipates analogy, the construction of the human self in geographical terms. It might suggest a creative-writing or therapeutic exercise prompted by the question “If you were a place, what sort of place would you be?” This would be an amusing and perhaps revealing assignment, but Bennet’s poem does something more strange and complicated with that act of translation: the person is also present, and often construed separately from the self-as-place. In fact, I wonder if some punctuation might be missing from the text I copied from The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (edited by Philip Larkin in 1973). The ambiguity may well be deliberate, of course. Antitheses are important: love and fright, success and jealousy (“their unsought sons”), madness and articulacy (“To speed to learn, vain wish to teach”), the “split mind” (perhaps indicating the relationship itself) for which there is no remedy. Although the adjective “lunar” is ambiguous, it’s difficult for the reader not to imagine the presence of either the moon or a moonlit object. If an object, what could it be, since it “has no history / is complete and early”? Some extremely ancient artefact? A stone? A very youthful face? A poem from two decades later, Nocturne 1, is an interesting subject for comparison. This is definitely a poem with a moon in it, and an argument about whether the moon is best seen as “goddess” or “faceless dynamo”. Auden in his maturity seeks balance: he reduces the lyricism, and some of the magic, but powerfully finds a counter-image, with the power to banish “my world, the private motor-car / And all the engines of the state”. The moon in “this lunar beauty”’ – if we insist on one “– is certainly not the woman she is in Nocturne 1. Imagine it embodied, and we might see the unusual figure of a moon-god.Again, Gwilym avoids the self-centred lyric rhetoric of an Elizabethan sonneteer or Romantic love poet. Gwilym’s voice always sound natural, even at its most elevated. Here, the diction is flatter, plainer. Even temporary absence is a state of dull, starless loss. The language of this is dense and, as she herself said, "congested", with "certain hard metallic lines ... introduced with deliberate emphasis to represent a period of muddled and intense thought which arose out of the first years of conflict ... " Roberts recreates in sound and vision both the heavy industrial labour and the violent action of war (a plane comes down in the sea in the last stanza of Part I). In Part IV, a lament entitled Cri Madonna, she adds a surely autobiographical portrait of the gunner-protagonist's wife, who sits "rimmelled, awake before the dressing sun", mourning her miscarried child in an image of "crape-plume/ in a work-basket cast into swaddling clothes." Satyamurti’s “room of last resort”, a passage leading to one of London’s tube stations is a familiar literary underground, too. The scene of escape that opens Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting, where the dead have exchanged unbearable battlefield chaos for futureless stasis might be an appropriate dimension. The poem continually evokes a kind of suspended animation in the rough sleepers, reflecting their tenuous and seemingly superfluous existence in terms like “strung out” and “stunned” (which could also suggest drug or alcohol addiction) and in the stanza-crossing enjambment in the first 15 lines. Satyamurti takes a long look at the passivity to which homeless people have been reduced; they are seen in a long view, over time, and have blurred into a near-collective identity. Although some may be only temporary “residents” (“you pass four, sometimes more”) they are intentionally reduced to types. Allison isn’t generally considered to be a war poet. Not having read the collection, and knowing only a handful of his poems from other sources, I am not in a position to argue. Conflict is an important focus in No Remedy, but it seems to be a personal one. The shadows of actual warfare are metaphorical. To cut to the chase, who wins the argument? Although Slog has the last word in the form of a punchy aphorism, “Windows don’t happen”, he must know, as a poet, that they sometimes do, or at least appear to. Sunlight, both poets would concede, is the necessity: the dilemma concerns the best way to invite it in.

I first discovered the poetry of the 14th-century Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym when, planning a poem about my roof-nesting herring-gull family, I cast around the internet for company and ideas. I was thrilled by the radiance of the poem I discovered, Yr Wylan: Gwilym’s seagull soars, alive and shining, even in English translation. At first God wanted just himself. And this huge output of light whirled in horror Throughout the heavens with nothing very much to do. Knowing evil and good he was bored. Knowing life he was really fed up, So he set up like an artist to fulfil his daily needs, And wandered from the first day and entered the second. Observation and detachment, sympathy and distaste, forge the inner conflict the poem confronts in its last lines. “I want them gone. I want to be absolved” is a line hard and glittering in its frankness, and in depicting the incompatibility of the two desires. This is followed by an immediate shift to the niggling practicalities – “Shall I give some coins to each of them?” It is at the level of finding an answer to this kind of question, moral and pragmatic, that the urge to action begins to die of exhaustion: “If it were only one, or just one day … ” Arthritic and tubercular, Tristan Corbière (1845-75) had a short, often dismal life. His single collection, Les Amours Jaunes, was “published at the author’s expense”. The poète maudit (as Verlaine dubbed him) seems to have discovered a kindred spirit in the toad: at least, he had nailed the dried-out corpse of one above the mantelpiece in the family home. The Glass Town Federation (the paracosm invented by the four Brontë children), began with a box of toy soldiers given to Branwell in June 1826. The game evolved into a series of written narratives, penned neatly on numerous doll-sized fragments of paper by the elder children, Branwell and Charlotte, with contributions from Emily and Anne. Its role in the literary development of the three sisters must have been considerable.

Horses connect the camper to the stars again: now he joins forces with the “star-herds” leaving “hoof-marks” over the open ground of the sky. The challenge to the landowner (“your estate”) is gently made, a slant-wise reminder why the poem was written and an assertion of the value of the unowned. Drummond Allison was born in Caterham, Surrey, in 1921. He took a “wartime shortened” history degree at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he formed a close friendship with the poets John Heath-Stubbs and Sidney Keyes. After military training at Sandhurst, he joined the army as an intelligence officer and was killed in action in Italy, at the age of 22. This week’s poem was published in his posthumous collection, The Yellow Night (1944). The above poem was the second of fourteen by Tagore in the June 1913 issue of Poetry magazine. Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature, "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West".