Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

Product Information

Many organisations over the years have celebrated with us. We've had social media take-overs; lunchtime readings; poem-a-thons and much more. Think about how you could bring poetry into your workplace this National Poetry Day. Let us know how you get on.

Whether it was triskaidekaphobia or the association of Friday 13th with goddess-worship that influenced the choice of the election date doesn’t seem to be recorded, but the claim in the opening couplet usefully locates the poem’s immediate context, and target. At the same time, it sets up readers’ expectations of a narrative with magical realist overtones. Naomi Foyle’s 10th chapbook, Importents, responds to a range of political catastrophes, local and global. The title poem finds its bearings in the UK around the time the Conservatives, led by Boris Johnson, won the 2019 general election.And in perhaps the most ridiculous poem of all, Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe writes about when is the best day to cut one’s nails, asking “ would bid yong folks beware on what day they par’d their nayles”?: Rhyme enhances the rueful comedy of the quatrains. Although “know it/poet” is an old familiar, it’s refreshed by the two ruthless epithets the speaker applies to himself: “baldy, wingless”. Finally, more alone than ever, he shrugs off what might be seen as the ultimate rejection. The crestfallen toad has “buggered off” and now the poet will do likewise, having announced, “Old toady-boyo’s really me”. This sounds like a confession of failure, but the questions at the start of the stanza have sounded their warning: “Well, is it really such an awful croak? / Can’t you see the bright glint in his eye?” Toads, like poets, should not be underestimated. Upper Kentmere, an area once prey to the Scottish raiders (reivers), belongs now the Lake District National Park. There are areas in the British Isles that have been turned into museums of the ideal: they exist for tourists and the associated hospitality industries. Beautiful and comfortable, they stimulate false images of nationhood, they are part of an identity through consumption.

Coventry is a realist, for all the heartfulness and sexiness in her poems, and often at her strongest when she confronts the harsher disappointments time delivers: death, family illness, change. She can deal with these subjects both directly and obliquely. On the Death of an Absent Father spells out the gap between the promise of the title and the actual contents. No father, no death, greets the reader. But the demolished hotel and the memories it evokes summon up the more significant loss. It is the first poem in a delightful new 12-poem collection, A Map of Love, which Wynn Thomas has edited for the University of Wales Press. The bilingual collection hops across the centuries from Gwilym to the present, and includes stylish linocuts by the artist, Ruth Jên Evans. It would make a good Valentine’s Day gift, and, if you’re Welsh, you’d only be a little late to offer the collection to a loved one in honour of St Dwynwen, the patron saint of love, whose day was celebrated on 25 January.Poetry is an important vehicle to explore individual identity and the identity of others. CLPE The Power of Poetry (2017) Wednesday Addams from the Addams Family is a modern example of this archetype, and some children’s charities are inspired by this interpretation of “Wednesday’s Child”. Of course, there are some readers who will interpret this negatively, fearing that their child is fated to be shallow, vain, and flightly.

For centuries, people have also tried to make predictions about the days of the week and how they relate to other important (and mundane) events.

Insert pending event

From this verse on, environmental damage accumulates. Padel sums up the sad, complicated story of the collapse of the Gulf Stream’s system of warm ocean-currents in the anthropomorphism of “failing muscles”. The image gives animal form and activity to the water, and suggests how all animals, ourselves included, will suffer, and are suffering, as the ice caps melt and the sea levels rise. The next “slide” in the visual presentation sweeps us into the core of the Chacaltaya glacier. Bolivia’s only ski resort has already been destroyed: that big number which gives its age (“two-hundred-and-fifty- // million-year core”) is tidily contrasted in the mimetic final stanza, tracing the glacier’s final shrinkage to an area “now shingle / and a fossil-feather-memory / of ice.” Again, the image of a living creature, one that could fly and, at least metaphorically, leave a “fossil-feather memory” in the landscape which humans used and destroyed, adds an intimate dimension to vast geological process. There’s an ominously placed line-break between the third and fourth lines of the second verse: “tolled” takes the emphasis, and is repeated in the first line of verse three. The bell seems solidly installed “between the cold and dark”. But something changes. The narrator comments on the quality of the bird’s song (“a clear true voice he had”) and perhaps it’s envy that prompts the bell’s response. We’re not told how its pitch or pace are altered – only that the narrator “knew it” (the bell) “had gone mad”. Children born on a Tuesday are typically associated with good manners, grace, refinement and elegance.They are considered courteous and full of good will.

Now other metaphorical shapes appear. The sun is “God’s ball”: it also has a mysterious, special “fringe”. The metaphors are given more space and separation in the original, but there’s something to be said for the clustering in the shortened version. The sun after all is no simple object. No one can hold it steady. It can change shape radically as the eye perceives it at different times of day and through various kinds of weather. A more detailed glossary can be found here, as well as the texts of The Twa Corbies and The Three Ravens. Arthritic and tubercular, Tristan Corbière (1845-75) had a short, often dismal life. His single collection, Les Amours Jaunes, was “published at the author’s expense”. The poète maudit (as Verlaine dubbed him) seems to have discovered a kindred spirit in the toad: at least, he had nailed the dried-out corpse of one above the mantelpiece in the family home. The Hot Poets are inviting people to submit and share their haiku poetry through social media - eight themes over the next eight weeks, starting with REFUGE. 50 of the best contributions, each week, will be turned into films for COP '23. Schools What is knowable, and how things are known, are themes of the collection. The Fool, a figure whose consciousness it often explores, may see more clearly through a gaze uncluttered by received ideas. Another poem, Performance, shows us poems “waving their inky little hands in the air!”: they know more than their writer. In Spell, the observation “We always think beyond what we can see” makes a similar claim, and sees it as a natural attribute.Children born on a Thursday have “far to go”. This is perhaps the line most open to interpretation in the poem. Horses connect the camper to the stars again: now he joins forces with the “star-herds” leaving “hoof-marks” over the open ground of the sky. The challenge to the landowner (“your estate”) is gently made, a slant-wise reminder why the poem was written and an assertion of the value of the unowned. This week’s choice is an abridged version of another great Dafydd ap Gwilym poem, Morfudd Like the Sun (Morfudd fel yr Haul). With this commentary by the scholar, translator and editor, M Wynn Thomas, the Morfudd sampling would be an ideal introduction for readers new to Gwilym’s work. The English translation now cuts to the most significant Morfudd image in the poem. At first, the girl/sun metaphor is reversed and it’s the sun that moves “with the dazzle of a girl”. The image isn’t decorative: “beautifully dressed in the body of the day” suggests daylight is the sun’s very skin, no mere costume. Benign and magnificent, the girl-sun “shepherds the sky from horizon to horizon”. It’s a refreshing change from Phoebus’s chariot, and boldly revises the masculine Christian representation of pastoral tenderness. In another of Bhatt’s poems, The Swan Princess Speaks, the narrator declares “I wanted to be everything: / a girl and a swan. I wanted to be free / to be a bird at home in any land, / at home on water and in the air.” Although the tone and style of Der Kleiber: Eurasian Nuthatch are quite different from the impassioned, wounded mythologising of The Swan Princess Speaks, perhaps the simple bird-as-itself also represents versatility and freedom, being the natural inhabitant of two elements, the air and the earth-rooted trees.