How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we’re shown?
DiggingBetween my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look downTill his strai...
But every now and then, just weighing in is what it must come down to, and without any self-exculpation or self-pity.
Behaviour that's admiredis the path to power among people everywhere.
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.
Which would be better, what sticks or what falls through? Or does the choice itself create the value?
The dotted line my father's ashplant made
Strange FruitHere is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.They unswaddled the wet fern of her hairAnd made an exhibition of its coil,Let the air at h...
I step through originslike a dog turningits memories of wildernesson the kitchen mat:the bog floor shakes,water cheeps and lispsas I walk downrushes and heather.I love this turf-face,it's black incisi...
Believe that further shoreIs reachable from here.
Be advised my passport's green.
You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
Was music once a proof of God’s existence? As long as it admits things beyond measure, That supposition stands.
Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.
The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousnes...
It is a great wonderHow Almighty God in his magnificenceFavors our race with rank and scopeAnd the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide.Sometimes He allows the mind of a manOf distinguished birth to follo...
In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Happy the man...with a natural gift for practising the right one [art] from the start--poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass like daylight through...