Poetry Notebook
Over at The Guardian, they’ve started a new series of collaborations between poets and photographers. Poems and photographs being among my favourite things, I was quite excited. But gah. I think the poem might work okay on its own but the photographs are so hopelessly literal, so dull, that they sucked all joy out of the thing. Here’s another poem by Sarah Maguire (the poet); it’s got the same attention to detail, the same sense of looking at small objects through a telephoto lens, and a similar sort of poofy ending.
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I prefer my poetry a little stronger, more bourbon than Bailey’s Irish Cream. Like this Sharon Olds reading of her poem ‘I Go Back to May, 1937′.
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Or Sonia Sanchez reading ‘Poem for Some Women’, startling and very, very sad. (Incidentally, Sanchez just won the Robert Creely Award.)
March 10th, 2009 at 7:55 PM
The Sharon Olds link is broken.
March 11th, 2009 at 12:37 AM
Rahul: Sorry about that. Have fixed it.
March 18th, 2009 at 12:55 PM
not really a great fan of poetry, but this was one was nice…liked the sharon olds one
keep posting 
April 7th, 2009 at 11:57 AM
an almost uncanny,even frightening snese of claustrophobia pervades the poem;seems like the poet is fighting hard with a fate she has already accepted as her own. muy fuerte-wrote that in eng first but wouldn’t mean the same.