30 x 30 ~ National Poetry Month

The Parrish Lantern, has been promoting National Poetry Month almost since the blog was first conceived, giving me a wonderful excuse to use this moment to showcase all the collections featured over the years. Poetry from places as diverse as Japan, Chile, Ireland, Greece, Romania, Germany, and the USA, and also from the fifth century to the present day have been showcased on The Parrish Lantern and it’s twitter feed Pomesallsizes, demonstrating that whatever nation or point in time people have expressed themselves in poetry. Here are thirty three collections of poetry, representing one for each day of this month, with three extra to represent each year The Parrish Lantern has promoted National Poetry Month.

The Collections. 

Poetry Of The Second World War - Edited by Desmond Graham

 The poetry in this anthology highlights the utter abhorrence and sheer mundanity of conflict, whether on the frontline or the home front, Auschwitz or Hiroshima, the experience of war is apparent and central. From Osip Mandelshtam, writing in 1937 (a year before his death in Siberia), through Keith Douglas, killed in Normandy or Miklos Radnoti murdered on a forced march, this collection charts the course of the Second World War, through the voices of these poets.

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The Departure - Chris Emery

Chris Emery drops you right into his poems/world, and once in you have very little chance to orientate yourself before being assaulted by the next image or poem; voices and fragments of lives hurtle past you leaving behind ghosts on the retina, neurons fired and blipping beyond the moment.

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Bernard Spencer:Complete Poetry:Translations & Selected Prose. Edited by  Peter Robinson

This isn’t  just a collection of  Spencer’s Poetry, it also contains his translations of the above mentioned poets & a selection of his prose writing,  as such it opens up a window into this writers work, and in the process gives us an understanding of a poet that although almost forgotten was considered a central figure of the Cairo poets and a distinctive voice in 20th century English poetry.

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Warriors - David Lloyd

This collection ranges far and wide drawing on characters from the past, whether historical or mythological and uses them to address issues that being timeless in nature are just as valid now. In this book Genghis Khan, Sitting Bull, and St Peter share space with characters from popular culture such as John Wayne and Tarzan,all raising their heads above the parapet and questioning everything from love, whether of family or Eros, to questions of politics, whether international or domestic.

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Definitions - Octavian Paler

This a very introspective collection of poetry, but one that will have you smiling at that collection of words placed in that “best order” & then the awareness of a deeper thought process will seep into your mind – that this collection of beautiful, clever introspective poetry, is not merely one individual’s exploration of self, but that it relates to you, us, all of us.

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School of Forgery - Jon Stone

beneath the artifice, beneath the games there is a candour that resonates, a passion that hooks you in past the word-bothering puzzles and clever facade, past the glitter-ball and the wizard of Oz contrivances, you find the poet, obsessed with language, and who has the ability to use it, not just as poetic gesture but with a depth, a strangeness and a beauty that beguiles.

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The Art of Haiku: Its history through poems & paintings by Japanese masters - Stephen Addiss 

Stephen Addiss, one of the foremost experts on this art form traces the history of Japanese haiku, starting with the earlier poetic traditions from which it was born through to the twentieth century and its position as possibly one of the best known poetic forms in the world.

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My Name on his Tongue: Poems - Laila Halaby

Laila Halaby was born in Lebanon to a Jordanian father and American mother, with her first collection of poetry, she uses a narrative style to explore what it means to be an outsider within your own culture, of trying to navigate between the two identities of Arab and American, and how this reflects on her as as women and as a writer.

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Across the Land and the Sea {1964- 2001} W.G. Sebald

Published a decade after his death, this anthology pulls together poetry from various periods of his life. Stretching over 37 years it contains poems from two early collections Poemtrees and School Latin, these are followed by his later writing Across the Land and the Water and The Year Before Last ending with the appendix containing two poems Sebald wrote in English

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Full Blood - John Siddique

Full Blood is John Siddique's fourth full-length collection of poems for adults. Erotic, physical, completely open and fully engaged with the moral urgency of life, Siddique tackles his themes robustly and yet with great sensitivity, constantly defining and reimagining what it is to be a man in today's world, living fully in the moment.

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Post-War Japanese Poetry

After the destruction left by the Pacific war (1945), Japan’s poets were stunned, demoralised and left coming to terms with the shock of total defeat. The first poets to raise their heads in this bleak period, had to look hard at what they saw and along with their nation reinvent themselves

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Red Riding Hood’s Dilemma - Órfhlaith Foyle

Red Riding Hood’s Dilemma, starts with a short poem of the same name, whose opening lines “Should I kill the wolf – or invite him to tea”, reflect (I think) a question running through this collection, we have poems of love & life cheaply spent, of death & of passions strong, here bodies ache, hurt, not in theory, the torment is real, as are the questions left unanswered.

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Amphetamine Heart - Liz Worth

These poems have that metallic taste of 5am, with the night fading to a tannic grit  on your teeth. This is the detritus of  good times, where hope is a commodity long since exchanged for a series of moments. This poetry is deeply personal, exploring the darkest corners of her psyche with that most powerful of magnifying tools – language, the words shining a path through the fragments of her life,

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~The Making Of a Poem{A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms}Mark Strand & Eavan Boland

After the introduction, both editors state their case for poetry via their own personal experience, first as readers, discovering the art and on to the status they later achieved as poets in their own right, it’s this experience, insight and passion that stops this book being a dry academic exercise

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Affirmation (Selected Poems 1986 - 2006) - Haris Vlavianos
Within these poems we are constantly aware of the surface of things/objects and, like in Sartre’s Nausea,  there’s an existential angst, as he probes the difficulty in describing  and explaining them. There is also a repeated reference to reality,  based on the dedication, this  refers to Wallace Stevens (Adagia) that “ The ultimate  value is reality?”

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Love Poems - Erich Fried

This poetry comes across as deeply personal, proudly wearing it’s lovers badge, and yet it doesn’t become corny, it is touching yet doesn’t become saccharine, bighearted but doesn’t simper or whine, this is a poetry that reveals it’s heart as an elemental force, natural.

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The Best British Poetry 2011 - Ed, Roddy Lumsden

Each poem within this stunning jewel of a book is accompanied by a note from the poet, giving a little detail of their lives and an explanation of why they wrote this particular poem, providing us, the reader, with added insight into the writing of each piece.

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The Juno Charm - Nuala Ní Chonchúir

This is a wonderful collection of poetry that investigates what it is to be alive, to love, to hurt. Nuala conjures up charms and incantations and calls on artists as varied as Frida Kahlo, Marc Chagall & Soozy Roberts, writers such as Basho, Kafka  and Plath to craft a poetry that is so personal and intimate and yet resonates.

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The Faber Book of 20Th Century German Poems ~ Ed' Michael Hofmann

 

Michael Hofmann puts forward his case for Germany’s inclusion on the table for best poets of the 20Th century, stating his claim that a nation with a roster of poets such as Rilke, Brecht, poets like Celan, Bobrowski, Müller & Trakl, others such as Grass, Enzensberger -  the placemat should  already be in situ, the setting card printed.

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Of Gentle Wolves - Anthology Of Romanian Poetry - Ed' Martin Woodside.

These are poets that are not chained to the past, yet have used their links with it as the tools with which to craft their own language, some of them working within a nation whose paranoia & ideology admitted no alternate vision

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What The Water Gave Me, Poems After Frida Kahlo. -Pascale Petit.

These poems pare away layers of flesh to get to the very heart of the artist, to capture that moment of transmutation, although in Kahlo’s instance transubstantiation would work – the change from a figure of pain ridden flesh, to an artist  whose life was her palette, her myth.

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The Romantic Dogs ~ Roberto Bolano

This is the story of artists, writers & poets exiled from all that could be called home. Individuals caught in their own private quests, hunted by nightmares, always on the edge, and yet  the penultimate  poem is about love (possibly his wife) and it ends with these lovely words suffused with hope.

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Giacomo Joyce - James Joyce

Giacomo Joyce is the link connecting A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, it pivots between the end of one and the beginning of the second. It is a love poem that is never recited

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White Egrets - Derek Walcott

Reading these poems you soon realise another figure stalks the landscape, that with the passing of time, there’s loss, there’s death, whether this is of friends, or the death of love, or just unrequited love, stillborn with regret.

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The Faber Book of 20 century Italian Poems - Edited Jamie McKendrick

James McKendrick’ s knowledge of Italian literature and culture is profound, as is his love and respect, this he wants to share with us, to give an impression of the depth and complexity of Italian poetry in the twentieth century.

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The Rattle Bag - Edited Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes

This will nourish the heart, will sustain the intellect, will make one laugh, will release tears pent up by ones own pride and  the need to prove oneself strong. This anthology is made up of Cairns each one signposting an experience,a feeling, a memory, all amounting to a large Cairn – Hope.

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Fully Empowered - Pablo Neruda

This is an outstanding volume of poetry by Pablo Neruda. The book was translated into English in 1975, and is a bilingual edition, with the Spanish originals and English versions on facing pages. It was first published in 1962 (Spanish) and Neruda considered it one of his favourites.

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Crow, From the Life  and Songs of Crow - Ted Hughes

Crow sloughs off persona after persona, Crow is Bran, Crow is Arddu the dark one. He is Chronos the emasculator,  Oedipus , Mans advocate & Gods conscience. At one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and is always duped himself.

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The Collected Love Poems ~ Brian Patten

This is a book full of beautiful images, of wide eyed wonder with the sheer beauty,terror of the collections subject matter.Fantastic creatures climb of the page to converse with the reader on items as mundane or as mythical as the readers credulity,or to curl up & slowly bleed to death whilst you shout your denials

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Pomes All Sizes - Jack Kerouac

What is there not to love in this book, it is part of my life. It makes me smile, makes me feel, it just makes me ?

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Unrecounted - W.G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp

A series of Micropoems (33)  by W.G. Sebald, each one is accompanied by a pair of eyes which are actually photo realistic lithographs created by Jan Peter Tripp. Some of the individuals featured are William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Rembrandt, Francis Bacon and Javier Marias

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Soul of a Warrior - Clash of Weapons

The first thing you’ll notice about this book is the art work, which if you are anything like me, you’ll find yourself turning the pages and imbibing the images

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The Penguin Book Of Irish poetry ~ Ed' Patrick Crotty

In the preface to this book it states that “This is the most comprehensive and confident anthology of Irish poetry yet

 

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These collections range from the first time a poet’s words were heard through to the final summing of a writer’s life. In these poems the whole of humanity is painted from images of divine beauty to the deepest hell man is capable of. Highlighting that in whatever language it is written in poetry speaks a common tongue.