The Guardian's Blog, page 191

Poster poems: the sun

Whether you think summer is finally here, or whether it's just wishful thinking, it's time for your poems about the sun to shine

After what feels like endless months of rain and cold, we've finally started to see some sunshine here in the western half of Ireland. To try to encourage it to stay, I thought we'd try a little sympathetic magic, and so this month's Poster poems eggs are sunny side up.

For John Donne, the morning sun was a "busy old fool", sticking his nose in where it wasn't wanted when it entered the bedroom where the poet and his lover lay. Donne's poet/lover is content to share his happiness with the solar visitor through the conceit that as the couple have created their own small world in that room, the sun's daily orbit has been made shorter and easier for him.

Donne was working with an old tradition, the Provencal Alba or dawn poem, that had been popular with the troubadour poets of the high middle ages, but the English poet adds his own twist. In the traditional Alba, the lovers dread the sun's arrival as it means they must part. Donne's lovers seem to welcome the morning light, despite the light-hearted name calling. Clearly they have no intention of being separated.

The symbolic relationship between the sun and love runs deep in poetry. Frequently the beloved is portrayed as the solar centre of the lover's life, and this is not always a happy conjunction. Thomas Campion's Follow Thy Fair Sun is a fine example, with its reminders that the sun's brilliance can result in both deep shadow and a certain amount of painful scorching.

In Dylan Thomas' Fern Hill, it is the morning sun, "born over and over" each new day, that drives the narrator's childhood pleasure in life and the natural world. Each day is a new adventure that kicks off with the sunrise, and it is this sense of a daily cycle following the sun's course that underlies the whole poem. Fern Hill exemplifies that sense that most of us have that all our childhood summers were glorious affairs.

For those fortunate to live on the shores of the Mediterranean, sunshine is more commonplace than it is for us Northerners. By its ubiquity, the sun can become a marker of routine, of the habitual. For instance, the afternoon sun, in CP Cavafy's poem of that name, by virtue of shining on a certain bed in a certain room, just as it always has done, summons up an entire past life and love.

While many of us are metaphorical sun worshippers, some people seem to take the phrase a bit more literally. At first glance, this certainly seems to be the case with Australian poet Dorothy Porter and her Hymn to the Sun. This is a poem that really does what it says on the tin, and it isn't until the reference to Akhenaten right at the end that you realise that perhaps Porter wasn't actually expressing a fringe religious adherence – the poem belongs to a whole series of works set in Pharaonic Egypt that she wrote in the early 1990s.

Walt Whitman's O Sun of Real Peace also has something of the hymnal about it, but in this instance the poet is singing in praise of the peace that followed the end of the American civil war. It is testament to the sun's versatility as a symbol that it can serve both as Campion's dangerous love and Whitman's characteristically optimistic "hastening light".

Finally, Molly Fisk reminds us that the sun's beneficial light is not confined to summer. Her Winter Sun celebrates "the hint / Of warmth, the slanted light" that helps sustain us through the short days and long nights of the winter, secure that not only will the sun be reborn tomorrow, but that summer, of sorts at least, will come around again in its proper time.

And so this month's challenge is to write poems on the subject of the sun; mostly from memory for some of us, I'm afraid. Is your sense of it warm and friendly or fiery and dangerous? Are you a sun worshipper or a sun shunner? Either way, please share your thoughts in verse here.

PoetryBilly Mills
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Tom Sharpe remembered

His books had the mad plotting of PG Wodehouse and the black humour of Evelyn Waugh. Later, when I got to know him, I came to understand what drove him

When I was an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in the early 1970s, an otherwise blissful life of indolence was occasionally blighted by the college's head porter, a pocket sergeant major of a man named Albert Jaggard. The 1960s had swept away most college rules. Those that were left – mostly relating to sex, drugs and alcohol – the authorities were too squeamish to enforce. So Jaggard, as head porter, made this his business. Like many bullies, he was a complex character, ferocious yet strangely loveable.

Those of us who nurtured secret aspirations for the literary life, would occasionally share the view that Jaggard was a figure "from fiction" or "should be in a novel". Then we discovered that this ambition had already been realised in a novel called Porterhouse Blue, in the immortal character of Skullion, by a savagely comic writer named Tom Sharpe, who died this week.

As a Corpus graduate, I became mildly addicted to Sharpe's comedies. They had some of the mad plotting of PG Wodehouse, the black humour of Evelyn Waugh – and something else (defined by Juvenal as essential to satire) called "savage indignation" (saeva indignatio).

Later, when I got to know him, I came to understand that what drove him was the resentful desperation of an outsider in a hurry. Sharpe first came to England from South Africa as a photographer. Through drive and talent, he broke into the English literary scene, and began to sell. One thing led to another. His books became bestsellers and he met and corresponded with his hero, Wodehouse.

For a while, he was spoken of as the heir to Wodehouse and Waugh. But Sharpe was too contrary to be comfortable with that kind of labelling. He retired to Spain (where his novels remain popular), and withdrew from the world of letters

When I came to write my biography of Wodehouse, I requested an interview and was rewarded with a wonderful sheaf of correspondence. Soon, we were in regular phone contact. The Tom Sharpe I knew was generous, acerbic, engaging, and full of wicked fun. Above all, he was supportive. He read my typescript in draft and made numerous suggestions. Long after the biography was published, he used to ring from Spain, after the siesta hour, to gossip, rant, reminisce – and amuse. I shall miss him.

PG WodehouseEvelyn WaughRobert McCrum
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Sam Leith's most hated online abbreviations

From LOL to NSFW, they connote one thing, which is 'I am a douchebag'

Thanks to the on-the-hoof style of chat-rooms and the curtailed nature of the text message and tweet, online abbreviations are now an established part of written English. The question of which is the most irritating, however, is a matter of scholarly debate. Here, by way of opening the discussion, are 10 contenders.

Linguists like to make a distinction between the denotative function of a sign – what it literally means – and the connotative, which is (roughly) what it tells you by implication. The denotative meanings of these abbreviations vary over a wide range. But pretty much all of them connote one thing, which is: "I am a douchebag."

1) LOL

This is the daddy of them all. In the last decade it has effortlessly overtaken "The cheque's in the post" and "I love you" as the most-often-told lie in human history. Out loud? Really? And, to complicate things, people are now saying LOL out loud, which is especially banjaxing since you can't simultaneously say "LOL" and laugh aloud unless you can laugh through your arse. Or say "LOL" through your arse, I suppose, which makes a sort of pun because, linguistically speaking, LOL is now a form of phatic communication. See what I did there? Mega-LOL!

2) YOLO

You Only Live Once. But not for very much longer if you use this abbreviation anywhere near me when I'm holding a claw-hammer. This, as the distinguished internet scholar Matt Muir puts it, is "carpe diem for people with an IQ in double figures". A friend of mine reports her children using this out loud. This has to end.

3) TBH

To Be Honest. We expect you to be honest, not to make some weary three-fingered gesture of reluctance at having to pony up an uncomfortable truth for an audience who probably can't really take it. It's out of the same drawer as "frankly" and "with respect", and it should be returned to that drawer forthwith.

4) IMHO

In My Humble Opinion. The H in this acronym is always redundant, and the M is usually redundant too: it's generally an opinion taken off-the-peg from people you follow on Twitter and by whom you hope to be retweeted.

5) JFGI

Just Fucking Google It. Well, charming. Glad I came to you for help. A wittier and more passive-aggressive version of this rude put-down is the website www.lmgtfy.com, which allows you to send your interlocutor a custom-made link saying "Let Me Google That For You" and doing so. My friend Stefan Magdalinski once sent me there, and I can say from first-hand experience that he's a complete asshole.

6) tl;dr

It stands for "too long; didn't read". This abbreviation's only redeeming feature is that it contains that murmuring under-butler of punctuation marks, the semicolon. On the other hand, it announces that the user is taking time out of his or her life to tell the world not that he disagrees with something, but that he's ignorant of it. In your face, people who know stuff! In an ideal world there would be a one-character riposte that would convey that you'd stopped reading halfway through your interlocutor's tedious five-character put-down.

7) IYKWIM

If You Know What I Mean. Ironic, that, because the first time someone used that acronym to me I had to look it up on Urban Dictionary. NIDKWYM.

8) TMI

Too Much Information. There's something annoying about this tonally. In the first place it makes everyone who uses it sound like a member of the cast of Heathers, Clueless or Gossip Girl – ie a spoilt teenage girl who'll say "OM Actual G" out loud and do "whatever" signs with her hands. In the second it's a bloody cheek. You're on a social networking site. The whole point of social networking is overshare.

9) AFAIR

As Far As I Recall. Rather like IMHO, this is pseudo self-effacement; with the background implication that your time is too precious to actually check, and that we should simply be grateful for this spark flickering from the vast Van Der Graaf Generator of your mind. Like newspaper columnists who ask: "Was it Voltaire, who said …?" LMGTFY.

10) NSFW

Not Safe For Work. How do you know where I work? It just so happens I work in a pornographic meme factory filled with obese 70-year-old men in leather hoods poinking farmyard animals in the ear.

• Join the conversation – nominate your least favourite online abbreviations and tell us why you think they qualify

Sam Leith
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New alternatives for Alt Lit

As mainstream publishers switch on to Tao Lin, what next for Alt Lit?

This week sees Vintage publishing Tao Lin's third novel, Taipei, in the US, with Canongate set to follow suit in the UK next month. Tao Lin publishing with mainstream houses? What does this mean for Alt Lit?

Praised by Bret Easton Ellis as "the most interesting prose stylist of his generation", Tao Lin is the poster boy for Alt Lit – a relatively new literary community firmly grounded in the culture of the internet and firmly wedded to the idea of self-publication. A provocative mixture of poetry, prose and cartoons, Alt Lit is suffused with the online world. In Lin's 2010 novel, Richard Yates, the emotional life of a cast of laconic, shallow characters is explored through transcripts of Gmail chats.

It's easy enough to see why some have responded with satire. Metazen, a mainstay for Alt Lit enthusiasts, proudly declares on its homepage to "not believe in non-fiction, both in a literary sense and an existential sense". The prose submissions page reads like the confessions of a literary sadist, albeit a discerning one: "We like text that is broken up and structures that seem unfamiliar. We like to read things that show a kind of suffering went into the work."

You can only dismiss Alt Lit as a pastiche of itself if you take it as one coherent movement – but how can you expect coherence from a movement with self-publishing at its core? Whilst there are thematic trends – introspection, diaspora, drug use – there are few characteristics that are truly ubiquitous. The community seems to thrive off an image of the tortured artist transposed to the internet age, an outsider status validated only by the tenuous nature of their internet presence. If commercial success emerges for Taipei, is the movement destined to meet a premature demise?

For Nicholas Lezard, Tao Lin's second (or third) novel, Richard Yates, finds him developing an interest in something "old-fashioned ... a concern for people, for the truth, a wish that lives could be lived better", an interest which testifies to influences from beyond the confines of Alt Lit. In his use of dialogue we see the subtleties of Richard Brautigan, seamlessly teasing out the profound from the banal. The narrative voice is reminiscent of the stripped-down prose of Raymond Carver, or of a slightly less visceral take on his newfound champion, Ellis.

Alt Lit may not be a modernism for the cyber-age – the movement is too disparate for that. If Taipei is successful, it will be a reflection of an individual talent nurtured through a supportive online community. As long as Alt Lit can throw up talent like his, it's far from over.

Bret Easton EllisRaymond Carver
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June's reading group: Sons and Lovers

Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence is the popular choice for this month's reading group

Sons and Lovers is the clear winner of the vote – and so will be the book we read on this month's DH Lawrence-themed reading group. It's clearly a popular choice. A few people appear to have suggested it because they happen to have a copy lying around and feel like they ought to read it, but more generally the reaction resembled that of Itcouldbewords, who wrote: "Sons and Lovers is the obvious entry into Lawrence's oeuvre – it is fascinating, original, and to my mind the first novel to treat the working class in a subjective, rather than objective, manner."

Gorky1 said simply: "Sons and Lovers please … Lawrence is a giant and really a poet!"

Will we agree by the end of the month? Having read the first few pages, I'm not so sure, but that's where the fun lies …

But before we get to argument, persuasion and hopefully discovering the joy of Lawrence, we have to decide which version to read, if we are to heed this warning from evensford: "Sons and Lovers is the obvious choice to begin with, but it's also important to think about which version to read. Lawrence was a greater reviser (as demonstrated by the three completely different versions of Lady Chatterley, all written independently of each other, from scratch), and Sons and Lovers was also heavily edited and censored by Edward Garnett. The fully authoritative Cambridge UP version of the text (which is available from Penguin in this country) has restored the text to something much closer to Lawrence's MS, and is substantially different (about 10% longer), as well as being racier and more passionate, than the other available versions."

I'm going to go for the Penguin. Don't worry too much if you have a different version – discussing the variations could be interesting in itself. I do, however, have one definite recommendation. I'm delighted to say that Geoff Dyer will be joining us for a webchat at the end of the month, and his Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of DH Lawrence sounds like essential reading for anyone who (like me) has doubts about Lawrence. Richardstrachan tells us it is a masterpiece. I can't wait to get stuck in.

DH LawrenceFictionSam Jordison
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Women's prize for fiction: Who will win?

Who do you think should win the Women's prize for fiction 2013? Could it be another win for Hilary Mantel, or will Zadie Smith triumph?

Tonight, the winner of the Women's prize for fiction - formerly the Orange prize, soon to be the Baileys prize - will be chosen. The shortlist is as follows:

• Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel - the second book in her Cromwell trilogy and the Bookies' favourite to win.

• Flight Behaviour, by Barbara Kingsolver - a cli-fi novel billed by her publishers as ' Kingsolver's most accessible novel yet'.

• Where'd You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple - Justine Jordan, our fiction editor, enjoyed it when she reviewed it, but is it a winner?

• Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson - a favourite on the books desk, it explores Ursula's many possible lives.

• May We Be Forgiven, by AM Homes - reviewer Viv Groskop says it 'sometimes reads like a brilliant miniseries. I gorged on it like a DVD boxset.'

• NW, by Zadie Smith - a novel about contemporary London life. After being overlooked by the Booker prize, could Smith bag a Women's prize to go with her previous Orange win in 2006?

We'll be covering the announcement live from the awards ceremony at the South Bank, London (it's a tough job, but someone has to do it), and will tweet the winner via @guardianbooks, before our comment and news pieces land on the site, but until then, who do you think will scoop the £30,000 prize this year? Could it be another win for Mantel? Over to you.

Women's prize for fiction 2013Hannah Freeman
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Thank you to everyone who responded to my request for feedback about TLS. You were unanimous in your thoughts, which makes my life a lot easier!:

MsCarey:

I prefer week-long threads. Sometimes I find even a fortnight-long thread difficult to follow. I have the impression that on a fortnight-long thread some conversations are abandoned because contributors may miss a response nesting in the midst of a dense mass of posts. I don't have any evidence for this - just an impression.

sararichards:

Please don't make these threads go for longer than a week. It always feels somehow fresh when I come to a new list - I am not sure why.
If books are really recommended perhaps there might be a way of highlighting them?

Perhaps we could come up with our own shorthand to indicate that a book is recommended? Perhaps we could do it just by writing: 'My book of the week: title of book'?

aliquidcow:

Personally, once a comment page goes beyond 3 or 4 pages I tend to give up on trying to look through it. Keeping it open for a month would inevitably lead to it growing to a daunting size. I'd rather people just continue conversations from previous week's posts if they're in the middle of one.

AggieH:

Personally, I always appreciate pointers to good book-related articles anywhere. A direct link is a word-of-mouth article recommendation. He would probably be alarmed to know it, but I am a particular fan of @PaulBowes01's discerning links - he's pointed the way to some very interesting, discussion-provoking book articles that I would not otherwise have come across.

SharonE6:

Weekly threads definitely. I don't look at the books in the review list - sorry - but would definitely be interested in hearing about what the team are reading.
I'd prefer new threads on a Monday.

Sorry, a day late, but I'll shift it to Monday from next week.

Getover99:

I also like the introduction being written by the books team. I often think it would be good if the books team were to talk more about what they were reading (or didn't finish). As surely it's 'the more, the merrier'?

So my conclusion is, not a lot changes needed. Of course, you are very welcome to change your mind later and suggest alterations or new features you'd like to see, but for now, I'll keep it as it is. And to carry out GetOver99 requested change, a quick ask around the desk reveals that we are reading:

• Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser
• May We Be Forgiven by AM Holmes
• The Seeing Stone by Kevin Crossley-Holland
• Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

As you can see, most of us are reading for work at the moment. What are you reading this week?

This week we are reviewing:

Non-fiction:
• China's War with Japan by Rana Mitter
• Jane Austen, Game Theorist by Michael Suk-Young Chwe
• The Last Man in Russia by Oliver Bullough
• Time Reborn by Lee Smolin
• Dear Lumpy by Louise Mortimer
• The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
• Money by Felix Martin
• Things That Are by Amy Leach

Fiction:
• Last Friends by Jane Gardam
• Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
• The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell
• Finches of Mars by Brian Aldiss
• All is Silence by Manuel Rivas
• Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty
• Noble Conflict by Malorie Blackman
• A Journey Round My Room, by X de Maistre

Guardian readersHannah Freeman
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Crime fiction: the new punk?

Just as the Sex Pistols invigorated a hidebound rock establishment, so contemporary noir could wake up literary novels to a wider world

It's pretty obvious that British fiction has been moribund for decades. The blame is usually levelled at a distracted public who, it is said, have better things to do with their time than read novels.

The problem, I think, isn't with the readers but the writers. With a few notable exceptions literary fiction in the UK is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension. The casual reader picks up the latest Booker prize winner and, in the words of Morrissey and Marr, discovers that "it says nothing to me about my life".

Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go onto Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at a working or lower middle-class characters. The fashions and the situations never ring true and the dialogue always sounds like something cribbed from EastEnders. Martin Amis's Lionel Asbo is only the most recent and notorious blunder in a long, ignoble tradition of posh boys trying to talk chav.

Maybe the time has come to jettison the whole literary fiction cadre and seek another way. In 1976 punk did its best to kill the bloated dinosaurs of progressive rock – and although that revolution was largely a failure, for a few years it did tilt the centre of gravity away from soulless upper-class music made by the likes of Genesis, towards energetic working-class bands like Joy Division, the Sex Pistols, the Undertones and the Specials, and towards cities like Manchester, Derry and Coventry. Crime writing could have a similar effect on publishing.

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat. This tradition began in America with writers like Jim Thompson and James M Cain, who wrote about grifters, losers, petty crooks and bums. These were struggling working stiffs barely making it, and only a wrong decision away from falling between the cracks or pushing someone else into one. The hardboiled school took off in the UK after the second world war and contemporary writers in this tradition articulate the voice of today's underclasses in a way that is accessible for mainstream audiences. People like David Peace, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell, Declan Burke, PD James and Eoin McNamee are able to take a genre novel and use it to explore class, race, gender, sexuality and other ripe issues in a way that literary fiction writers often cannot.

An intricate dissection of the boundary between working and lower-middle class Yorkshire life is a running theme throughout David Peace's 1974 and is as well observed as anything from the pen of Alan Bennett.

"Having a nice time?"
"You know Barry. Gets a bit obtuse," I whispered.
"Obtuse? That's a big word for you."

Throughout Peace's Red Riding Quartet working-class detectives, journalists and other professionals find themselves trapped in that awkward world of class unease, pushed and pulled, mocked and abused, from above and below. In the latest Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus novel, Standing In Another Man's Grave, class war manifests itself in the choice between a prawn Marie Rose sandwich or bacon flavoured crisps.

Perhaps because of their crowd-pleasing origins, crime novels have an unjustified reputation for literary shoddiness. Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe weren't the first or the last authors to beg posterity to ignore their crime fiction and concentrate on their "more serious" works. Julian Barnes and John Banville, to name but two, have taken the precaution of assuming pen-names when publishing in the mystery genre. But it's unfair to tar all mystery novelists with the James Patterson brush – there are good books and bad ones, well-drawn charcters and shoddily-written ones. In Declan Burke's brilliant metafictional Absolute Zero Cool, the protagonist is so enraged by his portrayal in Burke's crime novel that he starts stalking the author.

Crime fiction also has its problems with the demotic, of course, though it is remarkable how flexible, responsive and resilient it is as a genre. In 1946 George Orwell was writing about The Decline of the English Murder but a quick scan of the shelves of WH Smith's demonstrates that the English murder has not only survived but thrived. The crime fiction novel (and the occasional football novel) is about the only place where you'll read about Birmingham or Manchester – or Reykjavik or Botswana, come to that. And it's in the English murder, not the English literary novel, that you are much more likely to hear authentic blue collar voices and dialogue. In the crime fiction section you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from, and speaks to you about your life – or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way.

Crime fictionFictionDavid PeaceJames M CainIan RankinAdrian McKinty
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Open thread: Why do some books give you a hangover?

Some books are easy to leave behind while others won't let you go. As an Angela Carter craze sweeps through our readers, the quest for a cure has begun

Why is it that you can put down some perfectly enjoyable books without so much as a backward glance, while others refuse to let you go? This thought was prompted in Lukethedrifter after an encounter with Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. His attempts to follow it with William Boyd's A Good Man in Africa having come to nothing, he concluded that he was in the throes of a literary hangover. R042 is also besotted. Perhaps, as he says, it's because this particular novel is out of the ordinary:

To be quite blunt, it was one of those books that stands out as something very special. Its scope - in terms of its social commentary, feminist themes and so on - was immense and it presented its arguments in a way which didn't hammer them upon you but instead made you feel that everything it said - about how unfair the world could be - was the most reasonable way of thinking.

But is there a special kind of special that keeps you hooked? To what extent is the compulsion the product of a particular writer's voice, and how much is it due to the magic of a single book? ClatteryClarence tentatively suggested Carter's gothic story collection The Bloody Chamber might serve as the literary equivalent of a bloody Mary - but would it do the job?

Another Nights at the Circus devotee Laura Oliver was left plaintively bleeting for a cure: "I devoured [Nights at the Circus] and have recommended it to friends, family, passing strangers... As such, do you have any suggestions of other reads or authors that have given you the same satisfaction? I'd love to hear."

Let us know which books have left you with that morning-after feeling – and what cures you have discovered to counteract them.

Angela Carter
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Poem of the week: two cinquains by Adelaide Crapsey

The unjustly neglected early modernist developed from haiku her own form, a vessel for pared-down vernacular observation

When a loved daughter was christened in Brooklyn Heights in 1878, the name Adelaide must have seemed to her mother, another Adelaide, and her father, the freethinking Episcopal minister Algernon Crapsey, a fine choice. But a name may date quickly, especially in times of dramatic historical change, and it's just possible that this distinctly unattractive handle contributed, alongside her gender, to the poet's later neglect.

Crapsey's posthumously published collection Verses (1915) was initially a popular success. Critical attention eluded her, however, and she was sidelined by the pace-setting anthologies. Yet she was one of the pioneers of 20th-century modernism. Inspired by a collection of Japanese haiku and tanka published in French translation, she invented the unrhymed, 5-lined, 22-syllable form known subsequently as the American cinquain. If only, like HD, she'd had Ezra Pound as a publicist and an intriguing pseudonym. Poetry editors just might have been more receptive to the work of "AC Cinquainiste".

The cinquains are a good introduction to her work and I've picked two examples for this week, Blue Hyancinths and Youth. They appear separately in her collection, but the pairing usefully illustrates her range, and recalls the haiku influence. Haiku traditionally consist of poems which focus on images from the natural cycle, and a sub-genre, senryu, depicting everyday social life.

Crapsey's stress-pattern is usually iambic. The number of stresses per line is 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, while the syllabic pattern is 2, 4, 6, 8, 2. However, she's not rigidly tied to these rules, as both poems demonstrate, particularly Blue Hyacinths. The beautifully casual first line ("In your") can be stressed in various ways according to pronunciation, or better still not stressed at all. The second line has five syllables, not four, and the fourth has all of nine. This is worth noting, because the irregularity seems to enhance the difference of scale between the flower's individual "curled petals" and the vastness of the "blue headlands and seas" their colour evokes. Fragile brevity takes on an increasing weightiness as the poem opens out into those rich classical associations, culminating in the "perfumed immortal breath sighing / Of Greece". The two-syllable last line of the cinquain can sometimes create the sense of a "dying fall", but here there's a culmination of meaning and sound in the now solidly iambic stress – "Of Greece". The last word consolidates the flower's mythical qualities, but the flower is not romanticised out of existence. This seems akin to the way HD's poems characteristically operate. Crapsey, too, had visited Europe; in fact, she had studied in Rome. A southern sensuousness is evident in many of her nature poems.

Blue Hyacinths, for all its allusion, is a voiced poem, a rhythmical pulse of praise addressed to the hyacinths. A different sort of voice gives utterance in Youth. The poem works like a small dramatic monologue. Although Youth was written before Blue Hyacinths, it's not an early poem. Crapsey wrote her cinquains late in her short life: she was already ill when she began them in 1911, working on them till 1913 and perhaps a little later (she died in 1914). The voice in Youth may or may not be that of the poet's remembered younger self, but it obviously denotes a speaker young and healthy enough to feel immortal. The syntax is cleverly organised to capture the natural emphases of vehement speech, and this time the first line is firmly iambic: "But me / They cannot touch, / Old age and death …"

There's no direct concrete description, but in the lines "the strange / And ignominious end of old / Dead folk" the adjectives are doing something they too rarely do in poems: pulling their weight. They show us how youth separates itself from age by instinctive blind revulsion. The repetition of "old" insists on the speaker's sense of the difference between these "folk" and herself: perhaps it also suggests, by protesting too much, that she fears their fate. An ellipsis after "death" (perhaps counted as a silent syllable) furthers the idea of a threat which defies expression. Unlike the speaker of Blue Hyacinths, this narrator seems raw and exposed, without the comfort of imagining a living, "breathing" past. Youth turns away from the image of the "old / Dead folk", unaided by any intellectual or aesthetic mediation. Three accented syllables ("old / Dead folk") create a shocking climax, an effect broadcasting what the speaker strenuously wishes to avoid.

Crapsey's earlier neglect has been repaired of late, and there are some excellent online sites devoted to her. The cinquain as a form is discussed comprehensively here, with a good accompanying selection of Crapsey's finest. An important champion of her work, Karen Alkalay-Gut has written an illuminating account of her discovery and reappraisal of a poet she initially feared as a boring, stuffy "local poetess" and has assembled a complete online collection here.

In terms of poetic DNA, Adelaide Crapsey can be regarded as HD's elder sister and Emily Dickinson's niece. Her stature may be smaller than theirs, but she's not a negligible figure. Rightly celebrated for her skills in the cinquain, she wrote poems of many shapes and sizes. While admittedly some of them can seem derivatively romantic, it's the keen-edged, pared-down vernacular of the kind found in the cinquains that distinguishes her, both as an heir of Dickinson (check out The Sun-Dial or You Nor I Nor Nobody Knows in the online collection) and as an important transitional poet of early modernism.

Two cinquains by Adelaide Crapsey

Blue Hyacinths

In your
Curled petals what ghosts
Of blue headlands and seas,
What perfumed immortal breath sighing
Of Greece.

Youth

But me
They cannot touch,
Old age and death … the strange
And ignominious end of old
Dead folk!

PoetryNew YorkUnited StatesCarol Rumens
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