In fact, I wonder if some punctuation might be missing from the text I copied from The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (edited by Philip Larkin in 1973). The ambiguity may well be deliberate, of course. Antitheses are important: love and fright, success and jealousy (“their unsought sons”), madness and articulacy (“To speed to learn, vain wish to teach”), the “split mind” (perhaps indicating the relationship itself) for which there is no remedy. Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran His poem, Le Crapaud, an inverted sonnet, has its own sour fun with voice and tone, but Forshaw goes further, seizing the opportunity for a rich brew of English and American-English slang, with terms such as “gob”, “dekko”, “buggered off”, “old toady-boyo”, clobbering the ear with melancholy-merry gusto. At the climax of his anecdote, Clegg chooses a poetic figure that shows us something extraordinary without appearing to sacrifice precise observation and record-taking. The “mid-distance lime tree” is simply “pulled flat like the loop of a seam / at the fact of a needle”. It’s the agency given to “the fact of a needle” that makes the simile such a powerful one. The needle, with its spare, intense brilliance, then becomes the after-image of the lightning. No flash, we’re told, has been observed. Clegg’s poem, in its fidelity to the event, does exactly what a poem is required to do: it forgets the dead cliche (the flash of lightning) and tells us something new. That incandescent sewing needle, so weirdly bright it imprints the retina through closed eyes, has radically changed the tree, flattened it as if it were a mere stitch of cotton thread. The reader’s inner eye is imprinted, too. This is a terrific verse, in which contradictions blur in the narrative’s rapid pace. The speaker has no sooner said, “He will not/ stay the night” than the lovers are out under the stars, and “he” starts the car. A brief reference to the name he likes to be called and the fact he “Needs to be called/ something, anything” suggests hard-won empathy. The narrator defines his “obligation” and enacts the “obliging”. His imperatives to self are beautifully paced over the line-breaks, and the repetition of “Give/ thanks. Give thanks” summons the spirit of an end-of-sermon blessing, as if solemnising the earlier “scripture” reference. Gladitorial combat ends in an after-glow of benediction. Is the “simulacrum” better than the original event? There may still be questions, but for now a reader can only be grateful for the ringside seat.

Lines Off, the 2019 collection by Hugo Williams, explores among a variety of themes the poet’s experiences of kidney disease and dialysis, followed by a successful kidney transplant in 2014. “Lines off” is a stage direction, indicating when an actor’s words are to be spoken off-stage or off-camera. It’s a title that gestures towards the writer’s theatrical family connections, a rich autobiographical source he has often mined in poetry, but in the present context, it also symbolises the reverse of such intimacy. Illness seems to sideline the sufferer from the real “action” of their own existence. As patients we seem to become less visible to others and to ourselves. The speaker for Spontaneity begins. Perhaps he’s invoking the famous letter from John Keats to John Taylor (1818) in which the young poet announced his view that “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”. I first discovered the poetry of the 14th-century Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym when, planning a poem about my roof-nesting herring-gull family, I cast around the internet for company and ideas. I was thrilled by the radiance of the poem I discovered, Yr Wylan: Gwilym’s seagull soars, alive and shining, even in English translation. Horses connect the camper to the stars again: now he joins forces with the “star-herds” leaving “hoof-marks” over the open ground of the sky. The challenge to the landowner (“your estate”) is gently made, a slant-wise reminder why the poem was written and an assertion of the value of the unowned. The five-lined stanzas flexibly worked in iambic pentameter, are unrhymed. The choice of blank verse, perhaps another way the poem relates to the Mahabharata, is ideal for conveying the relentless drive of the speaker to “talk on by”.Though Roberts's aim is far from merely descriptive, she succeeds in producing one of the most full and multi-faceted evocations of the second world war to be found in English-language poetry. That gently evocative phrase, “the day of easy speech”, reminded me of Tennyson’s gesture towards Arthur Henry Hallam (“the tender grace of a day that is dead”) in Break, Break, Break. Allison’s tone is less emotional, of course: there’s a subtler level of analysis at work, and the syntax and diction are chosen to emphasise rather than untangle the complexity. Then we’re lifted into a Romantic register again, with “cloudy fancies” and “divine expression.” This initial comparison is vague because it’s difficult to attribute meaning to the phrase “divine expression”. It’s a somewhat Wordsworthian idea: nature as a source of “intimations of immortality” perhaps. The implication could include prayer itself. Longfellow’s next comparison, the “white countenance” as the “confession” of “the troubled heart” is contrastingly specific: the effect is powerful. It carries us to the nub of the verse, the word “grief” in the last line. The emotion is attributed to the sky, of course, but by now the sympathetic reader might suspect something more is going on.

This week’s poem, recalling the experience of wild camping on Dartmoor, was Sean Borodale’s response on 13 January to a local landowner case against the use of the moorland for this purpose. In a prose-note to the poem, Borodale wrote: “Wild camping is a frail, frayed remnant of deeper engagement, and the writing of this poem is an appeal against the belief that powerful landscapes are only for the wealthy, to be reserved for specific kinds of recreation – hunting, shooting – or as passing photo opportunities.” So God mused on the seventh day and lazed among the hills, And Eve spying him out asleep against the hedge Shouted, and knew herself to be a shrew. This, she said and meant it for thousands of years after, 'Boss, this is a man's game it is the religion of man Just who created woman and where do we come in... The seventh day is lousy it is our worst ever.' Gwilym glorifies Morfudd, said to be a rich merchant’s wife from Aberystwyth, as a troubadour might glorify his lady, but from closer quarters. For all her bejewelled brightness, she is no static icon, rather a force of nature. When we first see her, it seems she is naked, “a sheen of snow on a pebbly field”. Then she is transformed into a breaking wave, with its surface foam and unfurling “breast” of colour, its play of sunlight and echo. There’s no need for any superlative claim that Morfudd is more beautiful than these natural phenomena. In Gwilym’s poem, human beauty never eclipses nature, but is equal in the whole sacred constellation. Earlier poems contain vivid evocations of Welsh village life, and the sound of Welsh English is brilliantly captured in her excursions into dialogue. She was not a Welsh speaker but, acutely, she was a Welsh-hearer, and her poems seem to emerge from the rhythms of cynghanedd and englyn, like those of Hopkins and Dylan Thomas himself. Roberts, a more marginal figure, did not achieve the exposure that would familiarise readers with her voice, and so create the climate for her reception. This underserved neglect at least means that readers today can experience as new her quality of bracing, wet-ink freshness. She also writes with sensuous power about her South American past:Second Sleep is an evocative phrase: it could connote death, the post-death sleep some religions believe occurs before resurrection, or an uncanny, perhaps magical, daylight doze. Hannah’s explanation chimed with my own experience: I often “sleep off” my first tiredness for a couple of hours, then feel fresh enough to start a mini-day. The second sleep brings the most interesting dreams. For me, they often dramatise a long-term fear, and have a mysteriously shadowy public setting – railway station, airport, concert hall, classroom. I have some control of these spaces, being simultaneously lost and in a determined kind of hurry. Escalators, corridors and occasionally a gigantic computer screen (aaaaaargh) may feature. For Hannah Stone’s narrator, the second sleep is a haunt of deeper nightmare, and the dream she recounts evokes an involuntary dash at an uncontrollable and fatal pace. The “bruised psyche” is strapped on a hurdle, being dragged along by galloping horses driven by the dead. One of the definitions of “hurdle”, and the most relevant to this nightmare, is “a frame or sled formerly used in England for dragging traitors to execution”. And so, among the small twists and turns of surprise in the narrative, we find the speaker preparing to “jot down where I’d like my body found”. Reticence hedges the plan: the identity of the finder, and the time the discovery is to occur are both “better left”. The idiom is one of understatement, and suggests perhaps a northern English terseness. It slips gracefully into the poem’s diction, its habit of never expanding beyond the essential. Interpretation also may be “better left”, and psychological symbols resisted. Maybe it’s best to let the place-person hybrid remain a mysterious entity, freed by the poem’s shifting boundaries of land and water, indoors and outdoors, to float between states of being.

Pool is from the New Poems section of Rowan Williams’s Collected Poems. As well as the Waldo Williams translation mentioned earlier, Poem of the week has previously featured Rowan Williams’s poem about the Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev. Stone’s prompt, the editorial call-out for poems on “seconds”, coincided with her interest in a concept that apparently preceded the introduction of street lighting. She explains: “I was aware from a poem I wrote about Pepys that in the 18th century it was common for people to conduct all sorts of business, in and out of the bedroom, in the intervals between sleeps. As an accomplished insomniac, I have plenty of experience of night-time lucidity, and I have observed that the majority of my most vivid dreams happen in the pre-dawn slice of somnolence. I wrote this poem in the aftermath of my mother dying, just after Christmas 2021, which coincided with me getting Covid, which is still with me in its postviral state, and produces a lot of very weird mental processes and sleep issues, among other things.” Eve arose indignant at his side. She was not created. Life compelled her forward. She held no scruples And immediately sought the forbidden tree. For this written evidence and graft of truth We can be truly grateful. Now at the end of his sixth day God, having Set his bait, fell away under his immortal palms To quibble with his conscience. The garden was too large to Till, and he had not given them their freedom. The cows Eve said were the only bit of sense.Crane parades a somewhat Elizabethan romantic-masochistic style when he claims this “cleaving and this burning” will be learned only by one who “spends out himself again”. The aftermath of the “little death” is colourfully and painfully evoked in the paired images at the start of the last stanza, the “smoking souvenir” and the “bleeding eidolon”. The first suggests a used gun, the second, a disconcerting image from a horror movie. The poet’s “sweet impudence” is apparent in the generally colloquial diction, but above all in his choice of double- or triple- word rhymes: “end go”/ “window”, “rude as you”/ “nude as you”. A joyful list of the sparrow’s faults in verse four is purposely unconvincing, especially when he repeats himself in “sweetly rude”.