Our theme this month was ‘Choices’, which provided a wide range of poetry from the melancholic to the reflective and/or religious as well as the humorous.
We began with Leonard Cohen singing If it be your will, a beautiful song / poem about God’s will and his choices for us.
If there is a choice Let the rivers fill Let the hills rejoice Let your mercy spill On all these burning hearts in hell This was followed by The Answer by R.S Thomas, a favourite poet of our group. Again dealing with religious themes, but in a more questioning way, typical of Thomas.
Kamikaze, by Beatrice Garland, a new poet to the group, is a brilliant, powerful, poem in the voice of a daughter, about her father, a Japanese pilot, who changed course homeward as he looked out of his plane at the land and sea below and remembered his youth and family. He is then ostracised by his family and friends when he turns back from his mission, and in later life questions his choice.
And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered
which had been the better way to die.”
The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot divided the group, some liking it and others not.
Our local poet, Meg Peacocke provided two poems: The Road to Balkh and The Toad on Barningham Moor - different but equally moving.
Poems by W. B. Yeats, The Choice and An Irish Airman Foresees his Death were followed by The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin.
Aphra Benn, a 17th century female poet, was next. Thought to be the first female poet to a make a living from her poetry, possibly because it was often quite racy. On Her Loving Two Equally tells of loving two men and when in the company of one, wanting the other.
On a similar theme, Wendy Cope’s Bloody Men has a disenchanted woman moaning that:
Bloody men are like bloody buses -
You wait for about a year
and as soon as one approaches your stop
Two or three others appear
Sara Teasdale’s The River is a short elegiac poem with the lovely image of a river choosing to go the sea but finding that the sea was not tranquil but ‘wild and black’ wants to return to the valley but too late is enveloped by the salty water.
Our theme for August is Birds.
Report by Elizabeth Long