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

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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. 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. 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”?:

For Hannah Stone’s narrator, the second sleep is a haunt of deeper nightmare, and the dream she recounts evokes an involuntary dash at an uncontrollable and fatal pace. The “bruised psyche” is strapped on a hurdle, being dragged along by galloping horses driven by the dead. One of the definitions of “hurdle”, and the most relevant to this nightmare, is “a frame or sled formerly used in England for dragging traitors to execution”. 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. In the following poem from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 25, the author makes predictions about which days of the week are best for a couple to get married. Note: in print, Second Sleep has the right-hand marginal justification usual to the prose poem, but impossible to reproduce here. The italics have been added for this online text with the author’s permission.)

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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”.

If you aren’t too keen on this fate for your child, take heart. A different version of the poem has Wednesday’s Child fated to be “merry and glad”. You can see this version below in the Variations section. Thursday’s Child Children born on a Thursday have “far to go”. This is perhaps the line most open to interpretation in the poem. In a version of Monday’s Child published in Harper’s Weekly in 1887, it is Friday’s Child who is full of woe, not Wednesday’s Child. This Scottish ballad is an unusually pared-down narrative, sharp and fine as one of those wind-whipped bones imagined in the last stanza. The storyline is minimal. A rhyme scheme of couplets, two per stanza, enhances the chilling briskness.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. Der Kleiber: Eurasian Nuthatch is a deceptively simple poem. The diction is plain: there is no special figurative effort to conjure the bird and inventively dazzle the reader. The tone is not that of the celebratory nature poem. Its curtness might be on the edge of humour, but there are hints of greater disturbance under the surface. The speaker doesn’t reassure the reader with specificity of context: we don’t know where “over here” is located. Interviewed in Kunapipi, Bhatt described her reluctance to be geographically placed and fixed. The polylingual naming of the bird in the current poem’s title may be indicative. Does this connect with a particular need (line two) for the two people in the poem to “feel sheltered”? Why, in the next verse, although the implication is rejected, should the nuthatch’s loud call raise the possibility of fear or pain? 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.