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

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First published in The Passages of Joy in 1982 and included in Collected Poems, 1993, Slow Waker combines formal precision with a certain easy and discursive style. As a character sketch of a young man, it presents a cool objectivity towards his subject from the outset. The boy is “the nephew”, as breakfast is “the breakfast”. The indeterminacy of his condition is established: he seems both asleep and awake at the table, and confusedly changes his mind about the offered cup of tea. On the fourth day the stars appeared in stern formation But were obscured by the sun's warrior rays. The evening of the fourth day found them poxed. They shone with anger rather than with grace And fulfilled no heavenly place. The moon yielded a false light and all things Living swayed with uneasiness and took Note of each other...interchanging and companionable... The secret of life stirred in their blood. And this the serpent termed fear. And he was right, For God disappeared that night into the mist. When the speaker’s gaze takes us, via the balcony, beyond the cosy inner sanctum of “sufficient booze / and shabby furniture” the view is presented objectively. The person who is the place has a long-sighted perspective on their own geography. Bennet’s angle is to blend the aesthetic and informative. Watery inlets are turned from pewter to bronze by the evening sun, “a habitat where rare / plants learn to live with salt, and birds nest on the ground”. A reader might be tempted to identify a seascape of the mind: it’s remote and the wonders are hard-won. Salt-water has forced difficult evolution on the “rare plants”: birds that nest on the ground face particular dangers. Trespass and, more fearfully, “death by erosion” threaten the arcadia, its creative freedom and pleasant sense of decline. In the place’s view, sketching, photography and note-making become environmental threats. Practical concerns may replace the artistic. 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.

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. Then we’re lifted into a Romantic register again, with “cloudy fancies” and “divine expression.” This initial comparison is vague because it’s difficult to attribute meaning to the phrase “divine expression”. It’s a somewhat Wordsworthian idea: nature as a source of “intimations of immortality” perhaps. The implication could include prayer itself. Longfellow’s next comparison, the “white countenance” as the “confession” of “the troubled heart” is contrastingly specific: the effect is powerful. It carries us to the nub of the verse, the word “grief” in the last line. The emotion is attributed to the sky, of course, but by now the sympathetic reader might suspect something more is going on. The five-lined stanzas flexibly worked in iambic pentameter, are unrhymed. The choice of blank verse, perhaps another way the poem relates to the Mahabharata, is ideal for conveying the relentless drive of the speaker to “talk on by”. This seems confirmed by the startlingly declarative first line of the last verse: “This is the poem of the air …” Yes, of course, Longfellow means to indicate the snowfall, but it also seems unavoidable that “this” is also “this poem,” the one Longfellow is writing and we’re reading, “[s]lowly in silent syllables recorded.” This week’s poem, recalling the experience of wild camping on Dartmoor, was Sean Borodale’s response on 13 January to a local landowner case against the use of the moorland for this purpose. In a prose-note to the poem, Borodale wrote: “Wild camping is a frail, frayed remnant of deeper engagement, and the writing of this poem is an appeal against the belief that powerful landscapes are only for the wealthy, to be reserved for specific kinds of recreation – hunting, shooting – or as passing photo opportunities.”

Lines Off, the 2019 collection by Hugo Williams, explores among a variety of themes the poet’s experiences of kidney disease and dialysis, followed by a successful kidney transplant in 2014. “Lines off” is a stage direction, indicating when an actor’s words are to be spoken off-stage or off-camera. It’s a title that gestures towards the writer’s theatrical family connections, a rich autobiographical source he has often mined in poetry, but in the present context, it also symbolises the reverse of such intimacy. Illness seems to sideline the sufferer from the real “action” of their own existence. As patients we seem to become less visible to others and to ourselves. Note: in print, Second Sleep has the right-hand marginal justification usual to the prose poem, but impossible to reproduce here. The italics have been added for this online text with the author’s permission.) Now other metaphorical shapes appear. The sun is “God’s ball”: it also has a mysterious, special “fringe”. The metaphors are given more space and separation in the original, but there’s something to be said for the clustering in the shortened version. The sun after all is no simple object. No one can hold it steady. It can change shape radically as the eye perceives it at different times of day and through various kinds of weather.

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. 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. 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. Alexandrina begins the poem with a moment of dramatic recognition, so that we immediately hear the first of the two voices and recognise the oral nature of the composition. The orality is underlined by the supple free-range rhythmic movement, and the variety of stanza structure and metre. As a poem, The North Wind is a kind of Ode – one with two singers. Perhaps Anne had read Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind (published in 1820) and decided a less compact and formal style than Shelley’s would best embody the North Wind’s declamations, although she may be sounding her own political note when the prisoner commands the wind, “O speak of liberty”. “Liberty” is a term, after all, that implies something more humanly pertinent than the freedom of the mountains.

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 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. Literary allusion takes on a typographical turn when the tadpoles in the water’s “sandy shallows” are seen as “hundreds / and hundreds of fat commas swept / from the compositor’s workbench …” The metaphor may connect the double life of the amphibian with the coexistence of type and text, print and language. It may also allude to one of the translations in Rowan Williams’s collection, In the Days of Caesar by Waldo Williams. The latter is a beautiful poem, intensely of and for Wales and the Welsh people, but suggesting a transformation that seems boundless. This is the last stanza:

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. 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." 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 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.

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”. This was the layering of the mists. And God not seeing what was under his foot Called this the second day.

The sonnet begins with an occupation by, rather than of, a place. That place is the sky: it feels so close it tells the speaker “what it is to have the stars/sown through the utility of the body”. The body is like a field, the word “sown” suggests, which has been seeded with stars. Rich harvest is implied, but the simply stated cancellations of the second verse register a lonelier mood. The tent, “the chapel of the canvas” provides a necessary refuge, its artificial sky sealing the speaker into a place of more internal focus. Beehive chapels come to mind. Revelation occurs in the perception of “how deeply I was momentary”. To be “momentary” might assume time to be threatening, but to be momentary “deeply” suggests an analogy with music, and how a single note, of one beat or less, can still be a chord, an embedding of vertical harmonies. Although the musical analogy isn’t made directly, the poem now seems to slip easily into the auditory world, central to which is listening to the minutest sounds, and “a new aptitude for silence”. Crane parades a somewhat Elizabethan romantic-masochistic style when he claims this “cleaving and this burning” will be learned only by one who “spends out himself again”. The aftermath of the “little death” is colourfully and painfully evoked in the paired images at the start of the last stanza, the “smoking souvenir” and the “bleeding eidolon”. The first suggests a used gun, the second, a disconcerting image from a horror movie. The speaker for Spontaneity begins. Perhaps he’s invoking the famous letter from John Keats to John Taylor (1818) in which the young poet announced his view that “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”.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.