We met on the first day of Spring, officially, though it has snowed since! But our poems were not especially tied to the season. Colette Bryce’s ‘The Poetry Bug’, though only 20 lines long, gave us a good deal of material to discuss. The line ‘of love’s shucked husk’ was particularly remarked upon for its taxing assonsance and alliteration. John Burnside’s ‘Notes Towards and Ending’ challenged us differently, with its reference to ‘the Hundertwasser sky’; and we debated how to understand the grammatical use of ‘Magnificat’. We all knew what it referred to, but not how it referred in the poem. Hundertwasser was an Austrian artist who died in 2000. His style is fantastic (in the literal sense), showing some influence of Chagal, and of Van Gogh, at least to the uninitiated eye. His skies are vividly, rather than realistically coloured and full of wild movement. We also looked at one of Andrew Motion’s poems about 17thC East Anglia ‘An Ultimatum’ from the collection The Pleasure Steamers.
Being only 5 of us, it looked like being a short meeting, but was not, since one of our number contributed a poem of her own for discussion ‘Making Walls’, by Veronica Anne (unpublished) also gave us plenty to think about.
Being only 5 of us, it looked like being a short meeting, but was not, since one of our number contributed a poem of her own for discussion ‘Making Walls’, by Veronica Anne (unpublished) also gave us plenty to think about.
