Nick
13th December 2004, 06:01 PM
If you don't have the book you can buy it from only £2.85 at abebooks.co.uk
Otherwise I suggest bookbrain.co.uk
To get us started, here's the blurb about Longley and the book:
"The poems collected in Snow Water find their gravity and centre in Michael Longley's adopted home in west Mayo, but range widely in their attention - from ancient Greece to Paris and Pisa, from Central Park to the trenches of the Somme. Meditations on nature and mortality, there is a depth and delicacy to these poems, a state of lucid wonder, that allows for the easy companionship of love poem and elegy, hymns to marriage and friendship and lyric explorations of loss. Though the embodiment of these themes is often found in the wildlife of Carrigskeewaun and Allaran Point - the plovers and oystercatchers, whooper swans and snow geese, the hares and otters, the marsh marigolds and yellow flags - Snow Water is emphatically a celebration of humanity. These are all, in a way, poems of love and kinship - even the magnificent sequence that links the horrors of the Great War with those of the Trojan War, and with all the wars between. What Longley says of Edward Thomas might easily be said of him: 'The nature poet turned into a war poet as if/He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf'. Full of intensity and grace, tenderness and wisdom, these are poems of deceptive simplicity from a craftsman of international stature."
The first poem is 'Overhead':
The beech tree looks circular from overhead
With its own little cumulus of exhaltations.
Can you spot my skull under the nearby roof,
Its bald patch, the poem-cloud hanging there?
This is a great entrance to the book - almost a programmatic poem in the style of the Classics he emulates elsewhere. We seem to zoom in on his home and him, searching him out, to begin the book, to be drawn into his world. It is only two simple sentences, one descriptive, the other asking. The question itself, I think rather like Frost's 'The Pasture', again invites us inwards. The richness of the tree seems deliberately contrasted with the bald head, but we are given the word 'looks' as a hint to what may not be true. This poem has a lot in common with 'Thaw' by Edward Thomas (one of Longley's acknowledged influences). There we have the same view of the world from above, although for different purposes.
There's a lot to discuss just in the two lines of this poem. So I'll hope others can join in.
Otherwise I suggest bookbrain.co.uk
To get us started, here's the blurb about Longley and the book:
"The poems collected in Snow Water find their gravity and centre in Michael Longley's adopted home in west Mayo, but range widely in their attention - from ancient Greece to Paris and Pisa, from Central Park to the trenches of the Somme. Meditations on nature and mortality, there is a depth and delicacy to these poems, a state of lucid wonder, that allows for the easy companionship of love poem and elegy, hymns to marriage and friendship and lyric explorations of loss. Though the embodiment of these themes is often found in the wildlife of Carrigskeewaun and Allaran Point - the plovers and oystercatchers, whooper swans and snow geese, the hares and otters, the marsh marigolds and yellow flags - Snow Water is emphatically a celebration of humanity. These are all, in a way, poems of love and kinship - even the magnificent sequence that links the horrors of the Great War with those of the Trojan War, and with all the wars between. What Longley says of Edward Thomas might easily be said of him: 'The nature poet turned into a war poet as if/He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf'. Full of intensity and grace, tenderness and wisdom, these are poems of deceptive simplicity from a craftsman of international stature."
The first poem is 'Overhead':
The beech tree looks circular from overhead
With its own little cumulus of exhaltations.
Can you spot my skull under the nearby roof,
Its bald patch, the poem-cloud hanging there?
This is a great entrance to the book - almost a programmatic poem in the style of the Classics he emulates elsewhere. We seem to zoom in on his home and him, searching him out, to begin the book, to be drawn into his world. It is only two simple sentences, one descriptive, the other asking. The question itself, I think rather like Frost's 'The Pasture', again invites us inwards. The richness of the tree seems deliberately contrasted with the bald head, but we are given the word 'looks' as a hint to what may not be true. This poem has a lot in common with 'Thaw' by Edward Thomas (one of Longley's acknowledged influences). There we have the same view of the world from above, although for different purposes.
There's a lot to discuss just in the two lines of this poem. So I'll hope others can join in.