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The cuts of the broken,
the cuts of the scarred.
The cuts of the fallen,
the cuts of the barred.
the cuts of the scarred.
The cuts of the fallen,
the cuts of the barred.
Bells wrote: "The cuts of the broken,the cuts of the scarred.
The cuts of the fallen,
the cuts of the barred."
I loved this little verse, very descriptive,
Yesterday afternoon I spent a most blissful and uninterrupted hour browsing in the best second-hand bookshop in the North West, Kernaghan's, in The Wayfarers' Arcade on Lord Street in elegant Southport.I've always loved the shop, but yesterday was a special pleasure because I had a £40 book token Christmas Present to spend, and Kernaghan's always has a terrific collection of second-hand poetry, plays, and lit. crit. books to fascinate.
My browse uncovered "Ezra Pound & Music - The Complete Collection" edited by R. Murray Schafer, an interesting and comprehensive gathering of just about everything Pound ever published with a musical connection. 516 pages now await my attention. I'm ever convinced that the superbness of Pound as a poet and poetry editor (The Waste Land) results from his acute ear for what is excellent in music.
Partly connected, because of my interest in how, between them, Pound & Eliot re-cast the direction of poetry in English is a £1.00 copy of "Tom And Viv", the play by Michael Hastings which Michael Billington described in The Guardian as "a tender, probing, quietly moving study of a haunted marriage... (Viv, Eliot's first wife) is threaded through every line of poetry he wrote in his richest years". This makes it a "must study" for me.
Third is a collection by a poet I now correspond with very occasionally on Facebook, Mark Doty. It is his 1995 collection "My Alexandria". I can see that I shall end up quoting many of the most memorable sections from these poems published at the height of the AIDS terror.
From a working poet of today to men who made their reputations far earlier, Douglas Dunn, and even earlier, Cliff Ashby. It seems odd today to find glossy hardback editions first published at only £1.50 - "The Happier Life" only the second poetry collection by Douglas Dunn after the success of Terry Street which had him compared with Larkin in the early 1970s - and £9.95 for the Carcanet edition of Cliff Ashby's "Plain Song - Collected Poems 1960 - 1985".
These will make much pleasure for dunking!
Finally there is another superb Carcanet find, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation from the Irish poet and critic Eavan Boland: "Object Lessons - The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time" (1995).
For perhaps the first half of my teaching life, I used to stress how important it is for students to focus hard on the words on the page when studying poetry or prose. The rest of the writer's life is in a sense immaterial to initial comprehension and appreciation, and that is what I still believe when the whole of literature is ahead of you, just waiting to be consumed.
What I now find is that I have the luxury of time, and limitless access to the souces which can tell me so much of the lives of the poets and novelists which went into the making of their art. Poetics & biography have assumed new prominence.
I am new to this site, I have just recently had a book of poetry published, called "Tragic Hearts" . This is one from the book. Mighty Oak
You are the fertile root
Of this large family tree
Feeding all the branches
With your equality
The Mighty Oak you’ll always be
We’re the acorns that you grew
Shook us from your sturdy tree
To start our lives brand new
Your root has now weakened
All branches feel the strain
Nourishment badly needed
Your root cannot sustain
Our Mighty Oak will never leave
Her roots have left too much
When comes time for us to grieve
Closed eyes, will feel her touch
we stare into the face of God
us illuminated
with purpose
Love is meant to be scattered
All life began with love
Love is understanding all and nothing
Not needing to leap ahead
embracing the now