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

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John Clegg defines the drily intriguing title of his third collection, Aliquot, as “the sample of a sample” (there’s a slightly more detailed definition here). The word may tie in, if loosely, to the sometimes-stated view that a poet’s individual poems should be considered parts of a single long poem. Lightning Strikes School Tree glances towards the ecological matters important to the collection as a whole. Similarly, it employs the crisp, precisely observant style of writing used throughout, showing it can accommodate a small-scale anecdote as effectively as it investigates a gene sequence. 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.

Yet this estrangement when examined in a poem can become a different and sharpened way of seeing. Williams’s characteristically laconic wit and casual tone are apparent in the poems of Lines Off, but the vision is at times more surreal, perhaps closer to that of the 20th-century poets of eastern and central Europe, such as Vasko Popa.Ultimately, of course, there’s no Krishna to bring light and redemption to this moral anguish. If the writing of a poem might once have had redemptive potency, the poet now disconnects the current by her question “What has a poem got to do with this?” The question seems to anticipate the answer, “nothing: it’s no help to anyone – not even the poet”.

There’s an ominously placed line-break between the third and fourth lines of the second verse: “tolled” takes the emphasis, and is repeated in the first line of verse three. The bell seems solidly installed “between the cold and dark”. But something changes. The narrator comments on the quality of the bird’s song (“a clear true voice he had”) and perhaps it’s envy that prompts the bell’s response. We’re not told how its pitch or pace are altered – only that the narrator “knew it” (the bell) “had gone mad”. There were four countries in the imaginary Federation. Branwell and Charlotte focused on the one called Angria but, when Charlotte went away to school, the younger siblings Anne and Emily eagerly devoted themselves to the continuation of the drama in their own country, named Gondal.Pool is from the New Poems section of Rowan Williams’s Collected Poems. As well as the Waldo Williams translation mentioned earlier, Poem of the week has previously featured Rowan Williams’s poem about the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev. Prose poetry is a genre that particularly interests the poet-theologian Hannah Stone. Her passion for the genre is reflected in previous anthology publications, a chapter in the essay collection Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice and three unpublished pamphlets in preparation – among them, the enticingly named Twenty-Nine Volumes. Allison even complicates the meaning of “succeeded” in these striking lines: “The day of easy speech / Succeeded soon by love and fright.” It’s possible that the day succeeded, ie was successful, because of “love and fright” or that it was succeeded (followed) by love and fright. The latter makes more sense – but then there would need to be a comma after the sub-clause, “and they / Made madness out of reach”. That gently evocative phrase, “the day of easy speech”, reminded me of Tennyson’s gesture towards Arthur Henry Hallam (“the tender grace of a day that is dead”) in Break, Break, Break. Allison’s tone is less emotional, of course: there’s a subtler level of analysis at work, and the syntax and diction are chosen to emphasise rather than untangle the complexity. It is the first poem in a delightful new 12-poem collection, A Map of Love, which Wynn Thomas has edited for the University of Wales Press. The bilingual collection hops across the centuries from Gwilym to the present, and includes stylish linocuts by the artist, Ruth Jên Evans. It would make a good Valentine’s Day gift, and, if you’re Welsh, you’d only be a little late to offer the collection to a loved one in honour of St Dwynwen, the patron saint of love, whose day was celebrated on 25 January.

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