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Poster poems: Crime

A tough challenge for the year's first assignment: please file your reports here

After the glories of last year's monthly calendar series, Poster Poems is sticking with things that come in dozens for 2013. This year it's eggs, loosely speaking at least. To get us off to a substantial start, we're having hard-boiled eggs for breakfast this January. Which means, as fans of Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain and hard-boiled detective fiction in general will not be surprised to hear, the topic for this month's challenge is crime and criminality.

It's fair to say that the original "hard-boiled" poet was probably François Villon: womaniser, hard drinker, thief and killer. Villon is in most ways the absolute antithesis of the Romantic notion of the poet as a somewhat effete figure starving in a garret and suffering for their art. He's one of those writers who is frequently quoted by those who have never heard of him, thanks to the popularity of the phrase "where are the snows of yesteryear", which is Rossetti's translation of the line "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?" from the French poet's Ballade des dames du temps jadis. Villon's outlook on life is summed up succinctly in the Ballade Des Pendus, or Song of the Hanged Men, which he wrote in prison while awaiting execution, a sentence that was never carried out.

Of course, where you have hanged men, you must have a hangman; society's licensed killer, "the killer who kills for those who wish a killing today", whose work and debatable worth is marked by Carl Sandburg in a poem called, simply, Killers. Sandburg's executioner appears to distance himself from what he does for a living by subsuming his personal responsibility into that of the five million citizen killers for whom he acts.

If Villon is the prime example of the poet as criminal, then Robert Browning must be the model poet as crime writer. The Ring and the Book, his murder novel in verse, is long but well worth reading, and you can capture much of the tone of that work from the short poem My Last Duchess, with the chilling casualness of the climactic words of the Duke: "I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands / As if alive." No more is said as to the manner of her death; no more needs to be. This detached attitude to murder is rarely found in poetry; one other example is the story of the girl killed in her bath in TS Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes.

If Browning's crimes are, by design, dramatic, then Amiri Baraka's Incident is much more matter of fact, occupying a space somewhere between eyewitness account and police report. This is crime poetry of the 20th century and of the city streets of America. Bakara's poem is explicit and detailed; by contrast, Kenneth Patchen's The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves is an outline plan of the action and leaves the reader to fill in the details for themselves. Its careful use of space and typography reminds this reader of the chalk body outlines that are so favoured by the makers of TV crime dramas.

Browning, Bakara and Patchen all write about crime from the outside, as it were. In Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane, Etheridge Knight brings us back inside. His poem occupies the same ground as Villon's did, but seemingly filtered through the lens of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The poem serves as a salutatory reminder that prisons are communities with their own social order and their own heroes, but these are not necessarily the pseudo-glamorous gangland figures that appear in the popular press.

In Prisoners, Denise Levertov's view is that the greatest punishment those convicted of crimes face is the deprivation of the ordinary, the ability to enjoy such ordinary food as bread or apples without the taste of prison on them. Levertov's outsider sense that the prisoner retains the ability to experience joy is not shared by the prisoner-poet Richard Lovelace in his To Althea, from Prison; for Lovelace, the joy of love deprived is his greatest loss.

And so this first Poster poems challenge of 2013 is to write poems about crime and punishment. For most of us, this will not be based on personal knowledge, so the opportunity to exercise imagination will be all the greater. So let's get cracking on the first of our dozen eggs. And a belated Happy New Year to one and all.

PoetryBilly Mills
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Modernism's first wave: turn-of-the-century literature

Joseph Conrad and Sigmund Freud's 1899 books signalled the first stirrings of a literary sea change

This weekend marks the start of an ambitious year-long interrogation of the culture of the 20th century at London's Southbank Centre.

The Rest Is Noise festival was inspired by Alex Ross's book of the same name, which won the Guardian first book award in 2008. Ross is a music critic, and music lies at the centre of the programme – but literature plays a part too, and the first weekend will look at the literature that ushered in the 20th century.

Centuries, though, rarely begin on the 12th strike of the centenary clock – and that's all to the good. So long as we take 1899 as the beginning of the 20th Century it's possible to see one of the great flowerings in thought, taste and literary style. In that year, Sigmund Freud first published The Interpretation of Dreams and Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness. One is a descent into the nightmare of the unconscious; the hidden lusts, and brutality lying under the veneer of civilisation. The other – well, the same, only written in German and much, much longer.

Both books were scarcely read when first released, which seems incredible now, when we regard them as such keystones in the century of psychoanalysis, and in the great sweeping away of the old Victorian certainties. It also seems strange because they remain such vital, fascinating works. They are still read for their inherent interest as much as their historical value, and because they mark the start of a remarkable roll of literary production. Conrad, in particular, was only getting going with Heart of Darkness. In the next 10 years he would also write Lord Jim, Youth, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. That's almost as many stone-cold classics from one man as all the writers now living have put out since the turn of the millennium. One man who wasn't even writing in his first language.

Or at least, that's the way it seems now. There's every chance we might be missing the masterworks under own noses, just as most of Conrad's contemporaries failed to realise how well his novels would endure. He was someone who shone the way to the future – and you can hardly blame most people for missing him when the lights of the previous age were still so dazzling. In those early years of the 20th century, Victorians such as Thomas Hardy, HG Wells, Henry James and Arthur Conan Doyle still dominated. Even George Bernard Shaw, who appears in so many pictures looking like the image of the 19th century with his heavy suits and massive beard, actually produced most of his best work between 1900 and 1914.

But that's not to say the grand old whiskers of literature had it all their own way. Young shaver EM Forster was writing just as well – and notable precisely because he was so good at lamenting the passing of the previous era. Edith Wharton rose to prominence through laying into Victorian suppositions in The House of Mirth. And John Galsworthy's The Man Of Property arrived to stick the boot right in. The old age was dying. By 1914, Ezra Pound was working on his Cantos. DH Lawrence had written Sons And Lovers. Proust had tasted his madeleine and produced Swann's Way. James Joyce had published Dubliners. And any list that tries to note all such changes is doomed to be more notable for its omissions than what it manages to include. What is certain is that writers were plunging deeper into the dark inner world that Conrad and Freud had begun to map out. Modernism was steaming. Even before the great cataclysm of the first world war, everything had changed.

This weekend's speakers include Marcus du Sautoy on Einstein, Lisa Appignanesi on Freud, Neil Bartlett on Salome and Helen Carr and Sam Riviere on Ezra Pound's experimental poetry. The literary weekends continue through the year and we'll be blogging about them. So let us know which you think are the key figures.

The Rest Is NoiseSigmund FreudJoseph ConradHenry JamesGeorge Bernard ShawThomas HardyHG WellsEdith WhartonJames JoyceDH LawrenceSam Jordison
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Tips, links and suggestions: What you are reading today?

Your weekly space to tell us what you're reading and our review list

I was delighted to see so many new people take part in the thread last week. Hello Rupert Lewis, Muricia Ashby and BookmanBill. I hope you come back this week so you see this name check!!

Thank you to Green Perspective for your lovely photograph at the top of the blog. If you'd like to share a snap of what you're reading, you can find all the instruction on our Flickr group.

Here's a roundup of some of the titles you have been reading recently, and what you thought of your choices.

pabloelbrujo:

I decided to start Middlemarch, I am throughly enjoying it and it has a been a lovely surprise considering it was a book I would have normal not gone anywhere near considering the subject matter and size. It has an excellent pace and at no point yet has it seemed to be a chore working through the text.

Richardpierce:

I have finished two books since I last contributed to TLS - The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared and Life of Pi. To my mind, these are books which are quite similar, but, strangely enough, I found the former to be full of redemption (which I think is what readers quite often seek), while I found the latter, the Booker Prize winner, to be without redemption.

You can read his explanation here.

ShutupBanks:

Reading Arrian's Campaigns Of Alexander in a beautiful Folio Society edition (yes, I am a snob). Reads like a gossipy bio and is therefore instantly accessible.

R042 chose The Art of Fielding:

one thing immediately stood out to me; I did not realise it was set in the modern day until references to flatscreen TVs, smartphones and computer games came in - and even then those references were the right sort, incidental mentions of things people do not to draw attention to the fact they are being mentioned but just to complete a picture of modern-day university life.[...] If you left those references out, The Art of Fielding could be set at any time in the mid-to-late 20th century. Critics of it claim it's an unremarkable, safe, bourgeois coming-of-age story set in a university. Perhaps it is, but if it is it's a very good example of one written in a way that makes you care about it.

Last week I attempted to fulfill the 'links' part of the title of this blog. I'll continue this week by telling you about Storybird which I stumbled upon.
This site invites people to upload their picture books and is building a community of readers, writers and artists; the strapline 'artful storytelling' says it all, really. I think it looks great, and as a reader (I haven't tried uploading anything) the functionality is intuitive and the pictures are big and clear. I was impressed by lots of the artworks and a few of the stories. Totally Awesome was quite awesome, although I didn't think the words were as strong as the images. I enjoyed What Will You Do When the Monsters Come? and Lucy's Imagination, but I'm still waiting for one to persuade me put my hand in my pocket and download it for keeps.

If you see any articles, blogs or sites that catch your eye, please post links to them below.

Here's our review list; a selection of some of the books we'll be talking about this week, subject to last minute changes.

Non-fiction

• The Love-charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel
• The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz
• Sorry! The English and their Manners by Henry Hitchings
• What Has Nature Ever Done for Us by Tony Juniper
• Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart
• Consumed: How Shopping Fed the Class System by Harry Wallop

Fiction

• The Friday Gospels by Jenn Ashworth
• Something Like Happy by John Burnside
• The Explorer by James Smythe
• The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon
• The Taste of Apple Seeds by Katharina Hagena
• Pow by Mo Yan

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers
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How strong emotion summons poetry

Only poetry, sunk deep into our bones, can articulate our most intense moments

I'm excited about reading the TS Eliot Prize shortlist, especially winner Sharon Olds's Stag's Leap. Olds says she "wants a poem to be useful", and to me poetry's usefulness cannot be overstated. I think everyone who loves poetry is partly made up of certain lines, absorbed at a bone-deep level, to be drawn on when they're needed. I must have more of these in my reservoirs, and I hope this shortlist will give me many.

When my father died, a few lines repeated on a low timpani roll inside my head:

"That is what the thunder said
The dead
Are dead are dead are dead
They return to the pool of atoms."

It wasn't consoling, but it gave me something to clutch – a spar in a howling gale. The fragment, spoken by Apollo, comes from Ted Hughes's version of Euripides' Alcestis. As a classical mythology geek, particularly interested in contemporary "reception poetry", I had read Tales from Ovid and Alcestis until they were as familiar to me as ABC, without ever realising that I would need that tiny fragment in the way that I did. In fact, I found in rechecking the quotation that my mind had cut out a "Forever", with a terrible, final full stop, after the last "are dead". I'm grateful to my subconscious editor for such vigilance.

When I was pregnant, I recalled with exaltation the Sylvia Plath poem I'd studied in a vague, doodling, grudging way at school – "O high riser, my little loaf". The baby remained "my little loaf" after she was born – the line still makes my nose prickle with involuntary tears, transporting me instantly back to a deranged and joyful post-natal state.

Shakespeare often shoulders his way into times that need heightened utterance. I had particular trouble, while breastfeeding, with Lady Macbeth, who constantly murmured "I have given suck and know/How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me …", needing to be cut off sharpish before I was tempted to dwell needing to be bitten off sharpish before the baby-smashing resolution came jolting along behind. She played merry hell with my hormones.

And train journeys, which I find both exciting and slightly sad, inevitably call out the first half of a poem by RS Thomas, The Bright Field:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.

It's a discomfiting poem to remember on something so fast-moving – each small bright field whips by the window in a blur, even as I try to possess it and remain in it forever.

In a rather less exalted vein, I also love the odds and sods that turn up on the tip of your tongue or the back of your mind at  inopportune moments (greeting periods with "The curse has come upon me!" is a particular favourite.)

I don't think kids need to learn whole poems to acquire the lines that will matter and mean most to them – the idea behind the recently launched Poetry by Heart campaign – they just need people who love poetry around, teaching it and reading it and being unafraid to be messily moved by it in front of them. These are some of the bits of poetry I'm made up of. Which are yours?

PoetryTS Eliot prize for poetryImogen Russell Williams
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Solve the Dan Brown title code

Can you come up with a an appropriate title for the Da Vinci Code author's latest?

So, monstrous bestseller Dan Brown's new novel is to be released in May, publisher Transworld has announced. In a slightly elaborate marketing exercise, its title will only be revealed after readers, as a reward for tweeting and Facebooking the news, have revealed, tile by tile, a "mosaic" that will in due course reveal what is more or less guaranteed to be this summer's blockbusting books hit.

Apparently it will be centred on "on one of history's most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces" and lead its readers to "the heart of Europe". Here at the books desk, we were wondering if our readers' legendarily sharp and learned hive mind might not be able to get the jump on the PR stunt by guessing ahead of time. Suggestions from colleagues include The Dante Codex, The Symbol Symbol, The Bestseller Code, The Blatant Anagram, The Shakespeare Simplification, and Thomas Pynchon's London Address.

Latest news: The title of the book, not that excitingly, is going to be Inferno, the reader mosaic has revealed. Presumably you folks can improve on that…

Dan BrownThe Da Vinci CodeFiction
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Rereading Stephen King: Different Seasons

Three of this book's four novellas are better known as films, and rightly so. But the fourth has an odd, unsettling power

I once had an argument with somebody about The Shawshank Redemption. It wasn't complicated: they didn't believe me that it was written by Stephen King. When I assured them that it was, and that it was published in the same novella compendium as the story that became the classic 80s movie Stand By Me, it was possible to see their belief system crumble. This film that they loved – like so many people, their favourite film (going by the fact that it's currently rated the best movie of all time over at IMDB – was based on a story by the man who wrote that book about the killer clown. That it says it at the very start of the movie, in the opening credits, is almost immaterial: to most people, it doesn't feel as they imagine a Stephen King story should. There's nothing weird, mystical. There's no horror, and he is, after all, a horror writer. (Of course, now I see that there is horror in the stories, just maybe not the horror that I was used to from him: instead, it's the horror of emotional lurches, of war crimes, of being an overly inquisitive kid, of telling stories designed to unsettle and shock: but it's a horror you have to want to see, I suspect.)

Way back when – and I actually can't remember the first time that I read this, only that I did; and possibly more than once, given the state of my collapsing copy – I didn't read this with any baggage. It's a King book, I thought. And the cover of my edition was about as "generic horror book" as it's possible to find. Based on that cover (bats, full moon, screaming woman, slash of blood), I expected Salems Lot 2: A Lot More. So, I read the stories, but found myself marginally disappointed. Different Seasons is a collection of four novellas, published together because they were, according to King, "mainstream (almost as depressing a word as genre)", and yet sold as any other of his novels was. So, my misunderstanding of what I was coming to read was understandable; my relative dislike my fault, however, not his.

I didn't necessarily want to read him writing about a prison escape or a Nazi war criminal, so I actually gave up on Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (to give it its full title), and on Apt Pupil, because I thought they were really quite boring. The first half of the book, culled. I did, however, love The Body, where four teenage friends, about my age, go off to find the body of another teenage boy, presumed dead. The narrator in it, Gordon, is now older, but he tells the story looking back at his teenage self: a boy who loved reading, who wanted to be a writer. (The narrative even features some short stories that Gordon supposedly wrote, although they are rather more fully-formed and complete than those a real 12-year-old would write, I suspect.) So there, I saw myself, or what I wanted to be.

Where I didn't see myself was in The Breathing Method, my favourite of the four. A story within a story (a structure that immediately appealed), it's about a woman desperate to give birth to her baby, even though she can't afford doctors. I couldn't tell you why I loved it, until I began rereading it: there's a sense of something curiously macabre from the start, which lends this – the least traditionally King story in the collection – an atmosphere that spoke to me.

So, in true obtuse style, the novella I perhaps liked least has become the most famous, through its film adaptation. I prefer the film of Shawshank to its written counterpart, no question. Even rereading it now, it was hard to shake the shadow of the film, which I feel is stronger, slightly, in pacing and storytelling. Don't get me wrong. It's good! Great, even, probably. But it works better as a movie. Some things just do. I could maybe be argued that The Body is the same – Stand By Me is a tremendously tense hug of a movie, tonally astonishing, nailing the hazy feeling of being a teenager in the most incredible way. The book does it as well, but – and the written-word heresy continues – I think I actually now prefer the film. I love it, because of how it makes me feel. It makes me remember being a kid rather than reading the story the first time around, and the two are very different things.

Apt Pupil has also been turned into a film, by Bryan Singer. It's a pretty good one, as well, and so I thought I knew what to expect. I did, apart from one major omission in the adaptation: that the novella is actually about serial killer. Reading it now, it's pretty nasty stuff: two characters, both killing the homeless in an attempt to either understand death, or to gear up towards killing each other. And there's some slightly uncomfortable content in there: one dream sequence, where the 16-year old main character, Todd, fantasises about the rape of a young Jewish girl, is a little clunkier than King-now would write; and some of the language, dealing with the notions of antisemitism, is similarly rather heavy-handed. Despite being maybe closer to King's usual oeuvre than the rest of the collection – serial killers! – it's actually my least favourite of the four. Another one where I prefer the film …

And so, to the last story in the collection: the one that I remember loving the most, but actually remembered the content of the least, simply because it hasn't been turned into a film. Truthfully, it couldn't be: it's a little slight, and there's not much plot. It's all atmosphere. I'm also pleased to report it's still my favourite: slightly odd, more than a little askew, it's got a fascinating narrative voice, questioning and curious. The story within a story holds up brilliantly well – there's a peculiar thing where one first-person narrator gives way to another with only a chapter break between them, and they have something of the same voice to them, a simplicity to their speech that makes you wonder if King isn't playing with that as a concept to unsettle you, to make you question the narrator – and the stories that both tell (one of hearing a story, another of a woman giving birth in the back of a crashed cab) quiet and strange enough that I can't help but love them. The final moments of both unsettle: fact blending into fiction, truths unspoken, neither narrator nor reader sure of what to believe.

I feel guilty, a little. Here are four novellas that are each at least pretty good in their own right – I might not like Apt Pupil, but there's nothing wrong with it on a fundamental level – but I prefer the film adaptations of them to the written versions; and the one I love most, there's not even a film of, and it's the smallest in the collection by some measure (and in every way that term can be applied). Maybe there's nothing wrong with that, though: they were shuffled out of the publishing house first time around, mis-sold, mis-represented. They're probably not anybody's favourite examples of King's writing, but maybe, in this case, the stories being well known regardless of the medium they're told in, maybe that's enough.

Connections
Connections a-plenty, here. The novellas reference each other in subtle ways throughout, but also reference a number of other early King works. In The Body, Cujo is mentioned, as is Jerusalem's Lot; and Chamberlain, the town where Carrie is set. Ace Merrill, one of the characters, pops up in Needful Things; and Evvie Chalmers is in both Cujo and The Dead Zone. Apt Pupil references Springheel Jack, a serial killer from the short story Strawberry Spring. And Rita Hayworth mentions Steve Dubay, later to turn up in It.

Next

A story about being young, dumb and owning your own (possessed, murderous) car: it's Christine.

Stephen KingFictionHorrorJames Smythe
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David Bowie's exceptional late style

With his new single, Bowie joins a select group of creative artists who continue to produce great work into old age

The mysteries of the creative life – where do ideas come from? what triggers a poem, or a story? where are the sources of inspiration? – have been vividly on display this past week with the so-called "second coming" of David Bowie and his surprise single Where Are We Now?

Not since Ted Hughes released Birthday Letters in 1998 has the lyric voice attracted so much attention.

Bowie's single follows the path of poetry in some significant ways. Evoking the Berlin of the 1970s, the "weird people" of Dschungel cocktail bar, and the dislocated atmosphere of Mehringdamm, it obeys Wordsworth's celebrated injunction for the poet to strive for "emotion recollected in tranquillity". Also, it focus on a "moment of being", the singer's recuperation in an apartment on Hauptstrasse after the madness of Los Angeles.

At 66, Bowie also defies creative gravity. Most poets and songwriters do their best work before the age of 40. Never mind the Romantics (Keats and Shelley dead in their 20s and Byron dead by 35), Shakespeare wrote most of the sonnets, Hamlet, As You Like It and Twelfth Night before he was 40. In prose, Tolstoy completed War & Peace in his late 30s. Proust was working on the last volume of Á la recherche du temps perdu on his deathbed, aged 50. Bowie's comeback, after a ten year silence in which some said he was dying, is both rare and remarkable.

The contemporary writer – not songwriter – who springs to mind as an artist blessed with a late flowering, is of course Philip Roth. Other contemporary greats who have come into their own towards the end of long careers include WG Sebald, and Geoffrey Hill, whose late work displays a poet at full stretch deep into his 70s. OUP, indeed, will bring out his Collected Poems this year. Such examples, inevitably, are exceptions. Age is not kind to most writers.

Finally I'd like to note the important inspiration of the Berlin Wall. The division of post-war Germany – now lost in the slipstream of history – was one of the defining events of the late 20th century. In literature, it shaped the work of Günter Grass, especially, and the late Christa Wolf. The experience of the GDR also inspired films such as The Lives of Others. Bowie's lyric is plugged into the romance of Germany's post-war fate, which also fuelled a generation of spy thrillers. It has, in a word, a rich cultural hinterland on which it draws deeply. The muses of art and history are at their best when working in harmony.

David BowieRobert McCrum
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Poem of the week: Shepherds by Sasha Dugdale

Both modern and ancient, this variation on the pastoral is a poignant meditation on the fate of the South Downs

This week's poem, "Shepherds", gives contemporary resonance to the pastoral elegy. It's by Sasha Dugdale and comes from her third collection Red House, published by Carcanet last year under their Oxford Poets imprint. Pastoral poets traditionally transposed their shepherd characters to a distant Golden Age, and gave them infinite leisure for their courtly preoccupations. Dugdale's focus is on the Sussex shepherds of the South Downs, "ghosts" now, but also real working men in a real place. Their decline, hastened by the expansion of arable farming during the second world war, seems to have otherwise been little noticed or lamented. These shepherds and their flocks trudged the old chalk grassland of the South Downs for thousands of years, and, as the poem shows us, helped shape the landscape as it is now. The very turf – short, springy, foot-friendly – is the work of generations of browsing sheep and nibbling rabbits.

The month is June, suggesting midsummer abundance and ceremony, with perhaps a gentle heat haze. The fine summer of 1914 seems also to hover. As if the figures might have reassembled "out of battle", the hook on the end of the shepherd's crook, designed to hold a lantern, carries in line two an ominous "musket barrel."

The internal "crook/hook" rhyme is picked up by "book" at the end of the stanza. That predominantly choppy sound might hint at distant gunfire, though it also echoes the tones of the solider sheep-bells, summoned by WH Hudson in A Shepherd's Life, as "the sonorous clonk-clonk of the big copper bell".

The visually striking compound depiction of the wind-sculpted hawthorn as "mermaid's hair and open book" is followed by an isolated hexameter line, like a down-to-earth corrective: "There are those who died on the hills, and those who died in their beds". Subsequent images suggest accidental conflagration ("the oil lamp tipped") as well as soldiering ("their crook a rifle/ cigarettes for their bible"). The word "rifle", rather than "musket", denotes a more recent war, and produces a startling para-rhyme with "bible".

The landscape seems reflected in the shape of the poem. Ebbing and flowing rhythms gradually unveil new perspectives. Dugdale sometimes avoids punctuation, letting the natural break at the end of the line do the work, or leaving the syntactic units connectively open. An occasional comma or stop at the end of a line seems to forge a link with the next, rather than a separation. The short closing line of each stanza creates a melodic cadence which is often a prelude to the next unit of sound.

"The South is tender and will harbour anyone," Edward Thomas wrote in his essay, "The South Country". This gentleness is registered by Dugdale when she personifies and feminises the land and writes that she (the land) is "never like a moor, never fierce like that". But neither is Nature, as conceived in the Red House poems, soft and sweet. Power as well as kindness is recognised in the way "She'd carry you back to our own gate/ On the palm of her hand … " There's a faintly visionary aspect, too. Although "the hills are not high" they are separate from "our low troubles". The children see them with "a shock of memory" – suggesting that the view, although familiar, is always freshly sensed, and brings, despite its magical proximity to the sky, a feeling of ancestral closeness.

The shepherds are not simply ghostly or mythic in stanza four: their association with the remote "high roads" of "kings and saints" is also a function of their work. The last we see of them is their dogs, also "Creatures apart". The poem is not entirely centred on the shepherds, however, and now it extends its reach in time and space – "Down the scarp, up there … " The beautiful last stanza reworks the trope of land as Bible, prefigured by the hawthorn's "open book". After the "blazing white" of sunlit chalk, suggesting bridal linen as well as clean paper, lovingly picked-out details illuminate this sacred South Downs text, and the sounds are as delicate as the images: "She wrote it in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady's smock/ She wrote it in sweet marjoram and adorned it with bells … "

The poignancy of the past tense and the possessive pronoun ("she wrote it for her shepherds") deepens the linguistic metaphor. What began as an elegy for the shepherds, and then became a eulogy for the Downs, seems finally to elegise language – the collaborative meaning made and shared between the place and its inhabitants, "Who are gone". The unreadable landscape seems, in that bleakly simple ending, to anticipate its own decline, a decline that can be interpreted to include printed "bibles" of all kinds. Pastoral gains a contemporary "edge" in Dugdale's threnody, but the poem's roots surely extend beyond ecological or social critique into the live connection between the close-reading poet (also a professional translator) and her native Sussex countryside.

Shepherds

Late June the ghosts of shepherds meet on the hills
And one has his crook with its musket barrel hook
One carries a Bible, and all wear the smock
And listen out for the little bells and the canister bells
Worn by the sheep and the big cattle, carried by the wind
Which shapes the hawthorn into mermaid's hair and open book.

There are those who died on the hills, and those who died in their beds,

The haloed, who wear a flame above them, were
Asleep in their wagons, the stove door ajar
The oil lamp tipped. And scores stamp
A last ghastly dawn patrol – their crook a rifle
Cigarettes for their bible.

The hills are not high. High enough
To exist outside us, our low troubles
At the school gates the children look up
And see with a shock of memory
That the earth gathers itself
Into another world
One closer to the sky

Once peopled by shepherds,
Who inherited the high roads from kings and saints
As they passed, withy ropes about their shoulders.
Who spoke little, and wore tall hats
Bawled gently at their dogs,
Who were themselves
Creatures apart

Times when the mist comes up
And rolls like weighted grey
Down the scarp, up there
The cars see their lamps reflected back
A metre ahead, and the back of her is silent
But never like a moor, never fierce like that
She'd carry you back to your own gate
On the palm of her hand – not bury you alive.

Her spine is a landshed, and a land of itself
A land of haunches and shoulders, and glistening fields
Impossible that they weren't in love with her
The kindness of her miles, the smalls of her back,
The blazing white of her summers.

The Bible is her book: she wrote it for her shepherds
To train them in oblivion and seasons
And the time she knows, the slowest time on earth.
She wrote it in chalk, in rabbit droppings, and lady's smock
She wrote it in sweet marjoram and she adorned it with bells
And it has no meaning for anyone, except the shepherds
Who are gone.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Reader reviews roundup

This week, readers get excited about imaginative descriptions, strong characters and social causes in our roundup of reviews

Vivid narratives, ranging from graphic murders to serene landscapes, have captivated our readers this week.

VanessaWu was enchanted by Viola Di Grado's 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, a novel that "can make a trip to the mall sound like something from Dante's Inferno." She praised Di Grado's manipulation of language, her use of metaphors and the unique female protagonist who "has a sick and morbid imagination." A careful balance of euphonic language and bleak insights into the disturbed psyche of the heroine make this novel a devastating, yet gripping read.

VanessaWu writes:

"To say that the author uses language expertly would be an understatement. In an inspired translation by Michael Reynolds, the novel blends English, Italian and Chinese to impart something that exists beyond words with a surreal, symbolic language all its own."

Likewise, Lakis praised the graphic novel Hawken, a violent thriller based on a vicious killer on a mission. "This is one of those special creations that keep the reader constantly at the edge of his seat." The addition of some witty humour also went down well; Lakis notes how well-drawn Hawken is, both as villain and as hero: "Hawken is a character that plants himself into your memory and makes you think of his persona and his mission again and again."

Another strong personality who made an impact this week was Ofir Drori, hero of The Last Great Ape: A Journey Through Africa and a Fight for the Heart of the Continent.

FlashyGreenEyes enjoyed the way in which "the protagonist succeeds in exposing the deeply institutionalized obstacles that stifled any scintilla of wildlife protection in places like East Africa" while he also "equally raises hopes and optimism." The evocative descriptions of Africa's mesmerising scenery, juxtaposed with the depiction of the harsh ways of living had a deep impact; FlashyGreenEyes noted that:

"although the coarse rugged landscapes and Ofir's stirring descriptions are not the focus of the book it is what this young man breathes, sweats and fights in standing up against the bribes, threats, poverty and corruption that hang over this land and threaten the survival of its indigenous wildlife and people."

If we have mentioned your review then get in touch by emailing claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk, and we'll send you some books to keep you entertained over the next week or two.

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Valerie Eliot remembered

TS Eliot's widow was no writer herself, but her experience and stories alone establish her literary importance

She would occasionally come by my Bloomsbury premises after a bibulous Italian lunch with friends from the British Library, full of good cheer. Once we had done a bit of business – she was an assiduous collector of TS Eliot, partly in her role as editor of the Collected Letters, but mostly because they were distributed bits of her adored late husband that she could bring home – she would settle in for a gossip and a giggle. In this context she was enchanting, a lively talker and (what is rarer) interested listener. And, what was most delightful, she had an apparently inexhaustible fund of stories about her life with Tom.

"Tom!" The late Valerie Eliot, who died a few months ago, was once of the few people who could call him that, naturally and affectionately. Even his colleagues at Faber, though they may have called him by his first name in the office, rarely referred to him like that once they were in the outside world. Mr Eliot, or TSE. But for Valerie there was Tom, and Ezra, Wystan, Joyce (never Jim), and so many others, for she arrived in Eliot's life at the end of that great period when modernist giants still roamed the earth.

She had a strikingly memorable face, a craggy amalgam of Mrs Thatcher and Ted Hughes, though without the imperiousness of either. She seemed straight out of the 1940s, with bright lipstick and pancake make-up, slightly frumpy dresses, coiffed blonde hair that never looked entirely natural. But once you were in her company all these modern stereotypes faded immediately. What first struck me was what fun she was. And secondly – it took longer to tune in to this and to give it a name – there was a quiet possession about her, the kind of glow that one encounters in people who have loved and been loved. None of the bite and restless dissatisfaction that most people, who have not been so lucky, manifest and endure. No, Valerie Eliot had been possessed by love, and it stayed in her possession, and one felt complicit in it, talking to her.

She and Tom, in a simple way that often caused amusement and more often envy in their acquaintances, adored each other, doted, smiled and giggled, whispered secrets and held hands in public. Played Scrabble of an evening and retired happily to the marital bed. No more the Eliot of the miserable marriage to Vivienne, no more the poet of The Waste Land, that great testimony to sexual misery.

It is sometimes remarked, as if to slight the late Mrs Eliot, that TSE never wrote anything of the highest quality after he met her. That is probably true, though she didn't cause it. (He was 68 when they married, 38 years older than his secretary, the former Miss Fletcher. They had almost eight years of marital happiness together, before his death in 1965.) There was very little seriously consequential work for many years before they married. Anyway, romantic poets do their best work young. (Do I feel an argument brewing?)

The late Mrs Eliot had a well-earned reputation as a zealous Tomist, and her fierce protection of his legacy and copyrights led her to refuse permission to quote from TSE's works even to such luminaries as Martin Rowson and Peter Ackroyd. Admittedly Rowson's brilliant noir version of The Waste Land was something of a piss-take, and TSE had expressed the wish that no one should write a biography (fat chance). But literary estates should facilitate the entry of an author's words into the marketplace, not impede the process. Indeed, after I met her, and was on congenial terms with Valerie, she still refused me permission to quote four lines of a poem on Radio 4, for no discernible reason. But as the (very) long project of getting Eliot's collected prose, poetry, and letters edited and into the marketplace carries on, with no discernible end in sight, it begins to appear as if Mrs Eliot had a sensible long-term view of the project, and I have little doubt that the final results will eventually justify the process. And – is it too much to hope? – at that point I presume there will be a significant relaxation of permissions to quote. I even suspect that, sometime in the not too distant future, an authorised biography might well appear.

Sometimes, after we did our bits of business, she would settle back and start to reminisce. She did so, largely, through little stories and anecdotes. Had she told me about that funny dinner with Wystan (Auden) and Chester (Kallman), in their grotty flat in Greenwich Village, with the Stravinskys?

It was a hoot. "For goodness sake," I expostulated while still laughing, "you have to write this down!"

She looked mildly shocked that I should suggest it. Though a great anecdotist, she would never have attempted a memoir. It would have seemed to her, I suspect, inappropriate. She was a very good – if slow – editor. Not a writer.

Yet people who have lived at the epicentre of literary life accumulate such stories, which entertain and instruct us about writers and their lives, and in so doing make them human, less Olympian. Such people are not so much reticent – often quite the reverse – as humble. If you have served as publisher, editor, relative or friend to a great writer you are fully aware of the gap between what you can do, and what they can.

I have urged friends like Martyn Goff, former administrator of the Man Booker Prize, and Tom Rosenthal, one of the great literary publishers of our time, to put their reminiscences down on paper. Why don't they? Both have written a lot, though never about themselves. Tom says publisher's memoirs are a bore, citing Tom Maschler's recent effort, which had dreadful reviews. Both Goff and Rosenthal have recorded their life stories and reminiscences for the British Library database of "national life stories" in the Oral History Department, though this does not make the material generally available.

And so, I suppose, it is incumbent on those of us to whom the stories are told, to pass them on.

Valerie's charming little story as I remember it, went like this.

"We were having dinner at Wystan and Chester's flat, and they were flitting about in and out of the kitchen, making a fuss, while we sat at the table and had a drink with the Stravinskys. At one point, I stretched my leg out, and my foot hit something hard. I peered under the table and – would you believe it? – there was one of those decorated Victorian chamber pots, filled to the brim with … Well, something frothy and not very nice.

"I was horrified, and thought I ought to do something. So I dropped my knife on the floor and bent down and put my scarf over the chamber pot. At this point, luckily, Wystan came in and diverted attention, and I straightened up quickly with the pot in my hands, and headed off to the bathroom. I emptied the contents into the toilet, flushed it away, washed it out and put it on top of the cabinet.

"When I got back they were still all chattering away. Dinner was served, everyone drank rather a lot, the plates were cleared. At which point Chester looked under the table, then dropped to his knees and looked again.

"'Wystan, darling,' he said, 'do you know where the zabaglione has gone?'

"They both looked anxiously under the table. It was gone, of course. And I wasn't about to say anything…. I've always wondered what they made of it when they found the empty pot in the bathroom?"

TS EliotPoetryTS Eliot prize for poetryRick Gekoski
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