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.)