National Poetry Month: Stop All the Clocks

April is National Potry Month in the United States, and I thought I would join in the celebrations and share with you some of my favourite poems this month.

This poem by W. H. Auden is heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time, and although I can't bear to read it too often, I think it is amazing for that very reason.

Stop All the Clocks

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

National Poetry Month: Dust of Snow

April is National Potry Month in the United States, and I thought I would join in the celebrations and share with you some of my favourite poems this month.

Dust of Snow

by Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

National Poetry Month: Carol Rumens

April is National Potry Month in the United States, and I thought I would join in the celebrations and share with you some of my favourite poems this month.

Carol Rumens

Photo: The Guardian

Carol Rumens is the author of 14 collections of poems, as well as occasional fiction, drama and translation. She has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence Farmer Prize, and was joint recipient of an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award. Her most recent publication is the prose book, Self into Song, based on three poetry lectures delivered in the Bloodaxe-Newcastle University Lecture Series. She is currently professor in creative writing at the University of Wales, Bangor, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest collection is De Chirico's Threads, published by Seren Books. (Source: The Guardian)

Carol also writes a weekly column in The Guardian. For more information about Carol, visit her website.

My favourite poem by Carol Rumens remains the first one of hers that I read. I was visiting London in 2004, and they were running a campaign on the tube called "Poems on the Underground". The selection of poems made boring tube rides more enjoyable, and this one struck a chord with me.

Once After Pushkin

I loved you once. D’you hear a small ‘I love you’
Each time we’re forced to meet? Don’t groan, don’t hide!

A damaged tree can live without a bud:

No one need break the branches and uncover

The green that should have danced, dying inside.

I loved you, knowing I’d never be your lover.

And now? I wish you summers of leaf-shine

And leaf-shade, and a face in dreams above you,

As tender and as innocent as mine.

Source