The Laureate has organised an an anthology for the Queen's Jubilee year and
over the last few days some its poems have been read by their authors on
BBC radio's Today programme - each poem is based on a year of the monarch's
reign - I quite liked yesterday's from Sean O'Brien's on the miner's strike
and someone who stole £10 from a collection - today's was a rather pretty,
almost Tennysonian assonant piece on the Thames by the Laureate herself.
There were references historical and recent - the Marchioness disaster, the
river stinking out a flooded Parliament, Gloriana's funeral barge an,
finally, the coming Royal culmination.
It cast a little spell, a pool of hushed awareness.
There is, however, a small ironic god residing on an editorial desk
somewhere as, almost immediately after, the Laureate's Thames was followed
by an item on the social cleansing via housing officers that is beginning
in London: a woman from Waltham Forest, recently bereaved and now a single
other, was interviewed. She had been offered a home in Walsall - if she
refused she would be considered intentionally homeless - and I'm afraid her
very precise sharp accent ripped the Laureate's lovely harmonies to shreds,
like a an antique Spenserian arras hung out in an un-deferential street.
It's not that I dislike Duffy's poem (nor Spenser for that matter - I've
been reading The Faerie Queene this very week) but our civilization is
UGLY, and any poetry that might be squeezed out of it has to accommodate
that.
I suspect though that any fears anyone might have about our having a
Socialist Laureate can rest a little, Masefield was probably an isolated
mistake :)
--
David Joseph Bircumshaw
"We are shallow, mababaw ang kaligayahan."
-* F. Sionil José*
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
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