The Great Bookclub Poetry Experiment was deemed a great success by all those in attendance (Jan and Anne H – we missed you!).

Jan had kindly sent along the comic relief in the form of a Tasmanian teatowel with a lovely little ditty about beer, “The bitter end”. Jinx injected just the right amount of drama into her reading!

And what a variety the rest of us supplied. Anne kickstarted things with Henry Lawson’s Faces in the Street. A bleak ballad of social injustice written when Lawson was just 21, rather than hearing it read, we listened to it as set to music by The Bushwhackers.

Jinx then treated us to a classic, Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud – her reason for the choice, nostalgic memories of enjoying this poem at high school and the fact that her favourite flower was the daffodil. We all agreed the last stanza was beautiful, particularly the lines describing the memory of the image of the daffodils:
“They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude”

Lorraine’s first choice was a great success, a poem she taught many times, AD Hope’s Advice to Young Ladies. I, for one had never encountered it before and enjoyed it’s take on gender expectations and politics.

My first choice was also a poem from high school, Keats’ To Autumn. I remember this because it was the first poem I really enjoyed analysing in depth for a school assignment. Living in Queensland, autumn was rather a foreign concept – especially in the way that Keats describes it. And even though colour is not really invoked, for me the imagery of this poem conjures up an autumnal glow.

Anne’s other two choices were from a contemporary anthology of Arab-American poetry, Grape Leaves. We enjoyed two of these selections for the way they described the cultural politics of everyday life.

Lorraine’s other choices were Twickenham Garden by John Donne – the story of a thwarted affair with a striking and dramatic opening line:
“Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears,
Hither I come to seek the spring,”

She also brought two of Wilfred Owen’s war poems – Futility and Anthem for Doomed Youth – which she liked because they were the antithesis of Rupert Brooke’s war poetry. I particularly enjoyed some of the images of war – so evocative in the first stanza of Anthem for Doomed Youth – using sound:
“What passing bells for these who die as cattle?
-Only the monstruous anger of theguns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.”

My other choices were The Hollow Men (which I have previously written about here and won’t repeat). Although it was quite the downer on the mood…which I guess is what Eliot was aiming for, and Emily Dickinson’s short poem:

“I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell!
They’d banish us you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”

What do I like about this? Well I think it shows a wry sense of humour, a conversational, conspiratorial style as well as intense disdain for the business of self-promotion. I was going to choose something else by her – but so many of them are about death and after the desolation and loss of faith in The Hollow Men I thought I should choose something a little cheerier.

All in all, lots of laughs, and jokes about Gerard Manley Hopkins. The best thing was the fact that we made the time to read the poems aloud. For we agreed that this is the way to really appreciate the poet’s skill.
We are all keen now to bookclub song lyrics…..but next time it’s a science fiction book chosen by Lorraine – A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jnr. I’ve never heard of it, let alone read it but am looking forward to it.