thou Turnest Again to Follow It Poems
Ailbhe Darcy
What other words could there exist for what I felt, at 13 or and so, when I laid eyes on a sure "gold, dark boy", just Chimborazo, Cotopaxi? Sure, these words may at times have been arbitrarily attached to other, more mountainy objects, merely here, in this verse form, they find their true home.
I met my future husband at 19, and I wrote this verse form in a notebook for him. By then it had already been echoing effectually inside me for years, telling me the truth about love. (Love is monomaniacal, honey is appalling, love is secret, beloved is kittenish, love rips y'all from the bosom of your family, love is woozy, love is ravishing, love is scrumdiddlyumptious.)
I should probably feel embarrassed at telling Republic of ireland that this is my favourite love verse form, but am unabashed. There are many fine poems about the grown-up parts of love, merely information technology's every bit infatuated teenagers that we learn romance, and as infatuated teenagers that nosotros do romance, all the rest of our lives. I don't suppose a marriage could corporeality to much if it didn't take a pair of infatuated teenagers hidden in it.
Ailbhe Darcy'south two collections are Imaginary Menagerie (2011) and Insistence (due May 2018), both with Bloodaxe
Romance
by WJ Turner
When I was merely xiii or so
I went into a golden land,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Took me by the hand.
My begetter died, my brother too,
They passed like fleeting dreams,
I stood where Popocatapetl
In the sunlight gleams.
I dimly heard the master'due south vocalization
And boys far-off at play, –
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had stolen me away.
I walked in a smashing gilded dream
To and fro from school –
Shining Popocatapetl
The dusty streets did rule.
I walked domicile with a gold dark boy
And never a word I'd say,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had taken my speech away.
I gazed entranced upon his face
Fairer than whatever blossom—
O shining Popocatapetl
It was thy magic hr:
The houses, people, traffic seemed
Thin fading dreams by twenty-four hours;
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi,
They had stolen my soul away!
Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh
The Gaelic tradition doesn't indulge in the schmaltz of St Valentine. The searing, eye-twisting pain of separation is more commonly featured in Gaelic love verse, such as in the devastating lines of Dónal Óg:
Bhain tú thoir díom is bhain tú thiar díom,
Bhain tú an ghealach is bhain tú an ghrian díom,
Bhain tú an croí geal a bhí i mo chliabh díom,
Is is rí-mhór m'fhaitíos gur bhain tú Dia díom.
For unadulterated sensuality, I refer y'all to any number of poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, although Fáilte bhéal na Sionna don iasc does end on a surprisingly tender annotation:
Is seinnim seoithín
do mo leannán
tonn ar thonn
leathrann ar leathrann,
mo thine ghealáin mar bhairlín thíos faoi
mo rogha a thoghas féin ón iasacht.
Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh'due south latest collection is The Coast Road (Gallery Press, 2016)
Theo Dorgan
She tells her dearest while half comatose
past Robert Graves
She tells her beloved while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With one-half-words whispered low:
As Earth turns in her winter slumber
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snowfall,
Despite the falling snow.
I know of no short poem in the English language language that packs so much magic and memorability into so few lines, except perhaps for Betimes'southward masterpiece (mistress-piece?), the early on 16th-century lyric known as Western Current of air.
Both poems share a deceptive simplicity of diction and seductive cadence, the evocation of the natural globe as the proper theatre of love, and an air of the mysterious – but the Graves lyric, I recall, reaches even further and deeper into the psychic hinterland of besotted dear than does the before poem. It catches perfectly the trance of new love, mayhap love as yet undeclared, the dawning realisation implied in "half-words", the reticence and delicious hesitation of one who right now, right here is discovering herself, or himself, new-fledged in love.
The shift in scale that permits identification with the Earth turning towards rebirth in leap is brought perfectly home in the poem's masterstroke, the repetition of "Despite the snow" and, even more, the suspension of time in that amplifiying "falling". A perfect poem.
Theo Dorgan'south latest collection is Nine Bright Shiners
Medbh McGuckian
When i was sweetness and 20 something , clutching at the straw of one's virginity, it was Yeats's lessons in lovesex that hit dwelling, from "Brown penny, 1 cannot brainstorm information technology too soon," to the adoring grandmother in When you are Old. Paul Muldoon'south clever-clever Cuba focused on a Catholic family unit in the nuclear '60s subverting puritanical denials and frustrations with a gesture of tenderness. The girl in information technology does non escape, whereas in John Francis Waller'due south Victorian ballad, The Spinning Wheel Song, the maid Eileen woos her grandmother into drowsiness with her ain appreciating singing (all wrong co-ordinate to the erstwhile woman), lulls her and leaps out in a bid for freedom to rove in the moonlight with her truthful love.
Being myself a protective grandmother now, I mind learning this chant as a child of eight and being seduced by the patterns and interweaving tunes of the sounds,the piece of work concealing the lovemaking, the rhymes and inversions twisting the Irish out of the English.
Medbh McGuckian's latest collection is Love, the Magician (Arlen Firm, 2018)
Enda Wyley
Some of the finest, nigh moving honey poems in the world have grown out of desolation and isolation. And still, the right love poem is strangely reassuring. Someone else has felt similar us and has really survived to write about it. Of a sudden we know nosotros are not lone. Suddenly we can make the love poem our own. Here is a favourite, a simple four line love lyric which I accept always admired. Information technology aches with loneliness and longing and is brusk but unforgettable. That the poet is anonymous, adds further to the mystery of the piece written well-nigh 1530.
Western air current, when will thou accident,
The small rain downward can rain?
Christ! If my beloved were in my arms,
And I in my bed once again!
Enda Wyley's latest collection is Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems (2014)
Peter Sirr
When it comes to love poems I like to go back to the source of it all: the troubadours of southern France who kicked off the entire tradition of the lyric love poem as we know it, poets like Bernart de Ventadorn or Arnaut Daniel who inspired Dante and then much he considered writing in Occitan. Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Marie de French republic, Gearóid Iarla, Yeats, Graves and everyone who writes under the sway of love today feels the hot breath of the troubadours on the backs of their necks. Some of the best of the poesy was written by women. Hither's one from the 13th century, by Beatriz, Countess of Dia, which I translated for a book I did called Sway: Versions of poems from the troubadour tradition.
Peter Sirr'due south latest collection is The Rooms (Gallery Printing, 2014)
How I'd like him …
Estat ai en greu cossirier
How I'd like him
oh
how I would like him my
cavalier
even if for a single nighttime
naked in my arms
his head resting on my lap
I love him, more
than Floris loved Blanchflor
I did non tell him this
Anybody, everyone should know
To him I gave my heart my soul
my reason my eyes my life
My tender beautiful cavalier
when volition I accept yous for myself?
For ane nighttime just
naked in your arms
If y'all could simply accept
my husband'south place
and swear to me you'll answer
when I call, and mind my desire.
Kevin Higgins
My favourite love poem is Mayakovsky'southward By one o'clock. Information technology was written to his on-off lover Lily Brik. The lines "Love'southward boat has smashed against the daily grind. / Now y'all and I are quits" always get me because they were anything but "quits". In 1990 it was revealed Lily was NKVD agent 15073 and had been informing the government about his disillusionment with the government of that prissy Mr Stalin. The verse form was left as a note when Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930. Information technology appeals because, big eejit that I used to exist, I in one case had a trend to fall for the likes of Lily.
Kevin Higgins'due south latest collection is Song od Songs 2.0 (Salmon Poetry)
Past one o'clock
by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1930)
translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey
By i o'clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Galaxy streams silver through the night.
I'thou in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you lot.
And, equally they say, the incident is closed.
Beloved's gunkhole has smashed confronting the daily grind.
At present y'all and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours similar these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.
Aifric Mac Aodha
For my starter, Seán Dunne'southward Letter to Lisbon because of where the "only" comes here: "to touch on your sleeve now/ would just exist plenty".
And for my mains, M'anam exercise sgar riomsa a-raoir (My soul parted from me last nighttime) by Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh, who mourns his first love, a beauty who bore him xi children and with whom the conversation merely improved. The verse form is particularly expert when his wife's empty couch-bed reminds him of amend times: "tárramair corp seada saor/ is folt claon, a leaba, id lár" (we accept seen a tall noble form/ with waving tresses upon thee, O burrow.) For all its cliches, that last one's a winner – it would stir the pulse and race the heart.
Aifric Mac Aodha'south latest collection is Foreign News (Gallery Press, 2017)
Louis de Paor
Equally it gets harder to tell the ventriloquists and their dummies autonomously, it helps to remind myself I'k from the aforementioned place as Jimmy Barry-Spud, Rory Gallagher, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Patrick Galvin: no fake; no lie; no alibi. Ó Ríordáin said Galvin's poems were "fíochmhar, neamhscrupallach, contúirteach" [tearing, unscrupulous, dangerous]. Technique is neither here nor there, he said: when y'all read Galvin's The Madwoman of Cork, zip else exists. The same could exist said of my favourite love poem, Plaisir D'Amour, where the mismatched couple are a perfect match. Paddy said his mother loved the verse form and his father hated it. Better again.
Louis de Paor's work includes Agus Rud Eile De/And Another Matter (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 2010)
Plaisir d'Amour
past Patrick Galvin
Spring
My father
Against the victories of historic period
Would not concede defeat
He dyed his pilus
And when my female parent called
He said he wasn't there.
My mother, too
Fought back against the years
But in her Sunday prayers
Apologised to God.
My father said in that location was no God
"And that ane knows it to her painted toes"
My mother smiled.
She'd plucked her eyebrows too
And wore a encounter-through skirt
With matching vest.
"He likes French knickers best," she said
"I'll have them blessed."
My begetter raged.
He liked his women young, he said
And not one-half-dead.
He bought a second-mitt guitar he couldn't play
And sang the only song he knew –
Plaisir d'Amour.
Summertime
When summer came
My male parent left the house
He tied a ribbon in his pilus
And wore a Kaftan apparel.
My mother watched him walking down the street
"He'll pause his neck in that," she said –
"As if I care."
He toured the earth
And met a guru in Tibet.
"I've slept with women besides," he wrote
"And they not half my age."
My mother threw his alphabetic character in the fire –
"The lying ghett – he couldn't climb the stairs
With all his years"
She burned her bra
And wrote with lipstick on a bill of fare –
"I've got ii sailors in the business firm
From Martinique.
They've got your children'due south eyes."
My male parent didn't wait to answer that
He came back dwelling house.
And sitting by the burn down
He said he'd lied
He'd never slept with anyone but her.
My female parent said she'd never lied herself –
She'd thrown the sailors out an hour before he came.
My father'south heart would never be the same –
Plaisir d'Amour.
Autumn
Through autumn days
My male parent felt the leaves
Burning in the corners of his mind.
My mother, who was younger by a yr,
Looked young and fair,
The sailors from the port of Martinique
Had kissed her cheek
He searched the house
And subconscious in a trunk beneath the bed
My begetter institute his 2d-hand guitar.
He plant her run across-through skirt
With matching vest.
"You wore French knickers once," he said
"I liked them all-time."
"I gave them all away," my mother cried
"To sailors and to captains of the sea.
I'm not half-dead
I'm fit for any bed – including yours."
She wore a sailor's cap
And danced around the room
While male parent strummed his second-mitt guitar.
He made the bed,
He wore his Kaftan clothes
A ribbon in his hair.
"I'll play it one more than time," he said
"And you tin can sing."
She sang the simply vocal they knew –
Plaisir d'Amour.
Winter
At sixty-4
My female parent died
At threescore-five
My father.
Comment from a neighbour
Who was in that location:
"They'd laissez passer for xx."
Plaisir d'Amour
Thomas McCarthy
Love possesses poets similar no other feeling. In contempo years the beloved poem that has most startled me and moved me is Vona Groarke's heart-rending Ghost Poem from her Gallery Press book X. That 10 could exist an Ex. or 10 bad things that can happen to dear. The poem is a reclamation of sensuous feelings, their ghostlike impressions and markings upon a lover's body. The skill with which Groarke layers those feelings is astonishing. Ghostly attachment makes "your life and mine/ that I made up and lived within". Anyone who has lost in love will get this poem instantly.
Ghost Verse form
by Vona Groarke
Crowded at my window tonight, your ghosts
will have goose egg to speak of but love
though the long grass leading to my door
is parted neither past you leaving
nor past you coming here. The aforementioned ghosts
continue in with my blood, the fashion
a small name says itself, over
and over, and so one minute is clangorous
compared to the adjacent, and I cannot locate
words enough to tell yous your wrist
on my breast had the aforementioned 2 sounds to it.
Yous are a sky over narrow h2o
and the ghosts at my window
are a full day until I shed their loss.
I desire to tell you all their bone-white,
straight-line prophecies
but the thought of you lot, this and every night,
is your veins in silverpoint mapped
on my peel, your life on mine,
that I fabricated upwards and lived inside, as real,
and I find I cannot speak of dear
or whatsoever of its current of air-torn ghosts to you
who promised warm sheets and a candle, lit,
simply promised me in words.
Vona Groarke, X (Gallery Press)
Tom Paulin
To Lizbie Browne may seem an odd choice of a love poem. I first encountered it in Dylan Thomas'due south great reading on an EP which my English teacher, Eric Brown, played to us in Belfast in the mid-sixties. It haunted me and later I came to see it equally primal, obsessive, even fetishistic.
Partly, I responded to that "Yes" – "Yes", but with a hint of "ochone". The give-and-take has a interruption subsequently information technology and this prepares usa for for the way the penultimate line pauses and so completes itself with "Love", which is emphatic and in a way heart-rending.
The 2 emphatic stresses on "Bay-cherry" tense the third stanza which softens into the Anglo-Saxon, slightly erotic, "flesh and so off-white".
The verse form is witty and in "coaxed and caught" slightly sinister. It succeeds in being both tender and self-mocking.
Tom Paulin's latest work is New Selected Poems (Faber, 2014)
To Lizbie Browne
I
Dear Lizbie Browne,
Where are you now?
In sunday, in pelting,? –
Or is your forehead
By joy, past pain,
Dear Lizbie Browne?
II
Sweet Lizbie Browne,
How yous could smile,
How you could sing! -
How archly wile
In glance-giving,
Sugariness Lizbie Browne!
III
And, Lizbie Browne
Who else had hair
Bay-red as yours,
Or flesh then Fair
Bred out of doors,
Sweet Lizbie Browne!
Iv
When, Lizbie Browne
You had just begun
To be endeared
By stealth to one,
You disappeared
My Lizbie Browne!
V
Aye, Lizbie Browne,
So swift your life,
And mine so slow,
You were a wife
Ere I could show
Love, Lizbie Browne.
Vi
Still, Lizbie Browne,
You won, they said,
The best of men
When you were wednesday ...
Where went you then,
O Lizbie Browne?
Seven
Dear Lizbie Browne,
I should have thought,
'Girls ripen fast,'
And coaxed and defenseless
You ere you passed,
Dear Lizbie Browne!
8
But, Lizbie Browne,
I let yous skid;
Shaped not a sign;
Touched never your lip
With lip of mine,
Lost Lizbie Browne!
IX
So, Lizbie Browne,
When on a solar day
Men speak of me
As not, you'll say
'And who was he?'
Yes, Lizbie Browne!
Elaine Feinstein
They Flee From Me
past Sir Thomas Wyatt
They flee from me that erstwhile did me seek
With naked human foot, stalking in my sleeping room.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and exercise non recollect
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times amend; but in one case in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and pocket-size;
Therewithall sweetly did me buss
And softly said, "Honey heart, how like you lot this?"
Information technology was no dream: I lay wide waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange way of forsaking;
And I have leave to get of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
Just since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
I've e'er loved this poem. You could argue it is unuitable for Valentine's Day, since Wyatt begins from his sense of rejection by the many women he has loved. He recalls them equally wild creatures who in one case "stalked with naked pes within my sleeping accommodation" and were willing to "take staff of life at my hands" with the gentle sensuality a homo might feel for a tamed animate being. All the more astonishing then to have him remembering one woman in a higher place all the others who throws off her apparel and takes sweet control of a sexual see. Few poems evoke more powerfully the strength and tenderness of physical honey, however much Wyatt goes on to arraign his lover for her "newfangleness" in going her own manner.
Elaine Feinstein's latest collection is The Clinic Memory: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet)
Julia Copus
My husband, Andrew, read John Donne's The Good Morrow to me during our wedding and I managed non to cry, though it'southward one of my best favourite honey poems. Another is The Shampoo by Elizabeth Bishop, a poem well-nigh the robust permanence of love; it ends with the speaker offering to wash her lover's hair in a basin that is "dilapidated and shiny like the moon". But I want to single out Don Paterson's timeless sonnet, Waking with Russell, near a new father waking in bed face to face with his 4-day-old son. At the mid-indicate of the poem, the speaker says he is mezzo del cammin – a quotation from Dante's Inferno meaning "in the heart of the journeying". The whole thing is exquisitely crafted (there are merely two rhymes throughout, though people commonly don't find on first reading) but information technology'south the emotional power that makes this such a great love verse form. And although it's written for a specific situation, that unexpected rediscovery of love in the centre of life's journey is something that resonates strongly with many readers.
Julia Copus's works include The Earth's Two Smallest Humans (Faber, 2012), shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Costa Verse Laurels
Waking with Russell
By Don Paterson
Whatsoever the divergence is, information technology all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-twenty-four hours-old smile dawned on him once more,
possessed him, till it would non fall or waver;
and I pitched back non my sometime difficult-pressed grin
only his own grinning, or 1 I'd rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was equally lost to me as ever
when you cut in front end and lit it as you ran.
See how the truthful gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the grinning poured through us similar a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.
Christopher Reid
So many love poems are concerned with the exciting preliminaries: first glimpse, coup de foudre, wooing, and winning or losing; too few celebrate what follows. Part of Enough by Bernard Spencer (1909-63) is a slap-up, uxorious exception. The poet describes his wife (I take it) bringing nutrient to the table ("soup with its skilful / Tickling smell, or fry winking from the fire") and placing tulips in a jug ("upright stems and leaves that you lot hear creak") in a way that brings all the senses into harmony, hearing and olfactory property no less than sight. He proceeds like a painter, coaxing coherence from disparate elements. The final stanza, in a risky gesture typical of Spencer, confounds both syntax and grammer to suggest an uncontrolled blurting out of joy, a matrimonial ecstasy that obeys simply its own laws. I find this ingenious, profound and moving.
Christopher Reid won the 2009 Costa Book Award for A Scattering
Part of Plenty
past Bernard Spencer
When she carries food to the table and stoops downwardly
--Doing this out of love--and lays soup with its good
Tickling odour, or fry winking from the fire
And I look up, perchance from a book I am reading
Or other work: there is an importance of beauty
Which can't be accounted for by there then,
And attacks me, just not separately from the welcome
Of the food, or the grace of her arms.
When she puts a sheaf of tulips in a jug
And pours in water and presses to one side
The upright stems and leaves that you hear crepitate,
Or loosens them, or holds them up to prove me,
So that I see the tangle of their necks and cups
With the curls of her pilus, and the body they are held
Against, and the stalk of the modest waist rising
And flowering in the shape of breasts;
Whether in the bringing of the flowers or of the food
She offers plenty, and is part of plenty,
And whether I run into her stooping, or leaning with the flowers,
What she does is ages quondam, and she is non merely,
No, merely lovely in that way.
(from Complete Verse, ed. Peter Robinson, Bloodaxe, 2011)
John McAuliffe
I honey the way Thomas Wyatt, even when he is abandoned and has to acknowledge, "They flee from me that some time did me seek", can yet remember, or cannot forget, what has gotten him into such problem:
In sparse array afterward a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me defenseless in her artillery long and small-scale;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"
I seem to become back to dear poems whose pleasure is salted past something else, a feeling often found in poems I studied in translation, in Lorca, or the Old English Wulf and Eadwacer ("What was never bound is broken hands, / our vocal together.").
More than recently, the honey verse form seems to take emerged from the shadows over again. The brilliant line-up of poets reading at the Cork International Poesy Festival this weekend features DA Powell whose rueful, heartsore poems include Abandonment Under the Walnut Tree ("Practice whatever it is y'all'd like to practise." he says "Be quick.") and just as good on honey is his compatriot Carl Phillips, with his nigh deranged extension of desire into everything he touches in poems like For information technology Felt Similar Power,
But my favourite contemporary honey verse form, which has something Wyatt-similar, charged and mysterious about information technology, is Lavinia Greenlaw's Essex Kiss, which moves from detail,
A touch on as assuming as rum and peppermint.
Chewing gum and whelks. A whiff
of diesel fuel, crocus, cuckoo spit.
to
Your body will give way like grain,
your torso will veer
smoke over a torched field
every bit the wind takes and turns information technology.
And a endmost couplet whose con and pro take their time to remainder and sink in:
By this are nosotros bound.
No paperwork.
John McAuliffe'southward fourth book is The Way In (Gallery, 2015). He teaches verse at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/love-poems-for-one-night-only-naked-in-your-arms-14-poets-pick-their-favourites-1.3385035
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