Poetry Unbound

O Tuama Padraig

Description

An immersive collection of poetry to open your world, curated by the host of Poetry UnboundThis inspiring collection, edited by Pdraig Tuama, presents fifty poems about what it means to be alive in the world today. Each poem is paired with Pdraig's illuminating commentary that offers personal anecdotes and generous insights into the content of the poem. Engaging, accessible and inviting, Poetry Unbound is the perfect companion for everyone who loves poetry and for anyone who wants to go deeper into poetry but doesn't necessarily know how to do so. Poetry Unbound contains expanded reflections on poems as heard on the podcast, as well as exclusive new selections. Contributors include Hanif Abdurraqib, Patience Agbabi, Raymond Antrobus, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limn, Kei Miller, Roger Robinson, Lemn Sissay, Layli Long Soldier and more.

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 06 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838856335
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Poetry Unbound
Also by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Feed the Beast
Borders and Belonging (with Glenn Jordan)
Daily Prayer from the Corrymeela Community In the Shelter
Sorry for your Troubles
Readings from the Books of Exile
Poetry Unbound
50 Poems to Open Your World
Pádraig Ó Tuama
First published in Great Britain in 2022
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Pádraig Ó Tuama, 2022
For permission credits please see p.359
The right of Pádraig Ó Tuama to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Poetry Unbound is a trademark of On Being
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 632 8 eISBN 978 1 83885 633 5
Interiors designed by Tom Etherington
Contents
Introduction
Pádraig Ó Tuama
Wonder Woman
Ada Limón
Book of Genesis
Kei Miller
Phase One
Dilruba Ahmed
A Portable Paradise
Roger Robinson
Worm
Gail McConnell
Wishing Well
Gregory Pardlo
All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs
Christian Wiman
Don’t Miss Out! Book Right Now for the Journey of a Lifetime!
Imtiaz Dharker
A Blessing
James Wright
The Word
Zaffar Kunial
Bullshit
Vahni (Anthony) Capildeo
Some Things I Like
Lemn Sissay
Say My Name
Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi
Miscegenation
Natasha Trethewey
Reporting Back to Queen Isabella
Lorna Goodison
When You Say ‘Protestors’ Instead of Protectors
No’u Revilla
We Lived Happily during the War
Ilya Kaminsky
Writing the camp
Yousif M. Qasmiyeh
Battlegrounds
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
[Whereas my eyes land on the shoreline]
Layli Long Soldier
Miami Airport
Raymond Antrobus
Kulila
Ali Cobby Eckermann
reconciliation
Jónína Kirton
All Bread
Margaret Atwood
Prayer
Faisal Mohyuddin
from The Book of Hours
Rainer Maria Rilke (Trans. Mark S. Burrows)
How Prayer Works
Kaveh Akbar
Of Course She Looked Back
Natalie Diaz
After the Goose that Rose like the God of Geese
Martín Espada
My Mother’s Body
Marie Howe
Father
Carlos Andrés Gómez
Man and Boy
Patience Agbabi
On Receiving Father at JFK after his Long Flight from Kashmir
Rafiq Kathwari
Essay on Reentry
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Married Love
Kathleen Flenniken
Exorcism / Freeport
Richard Georges
22: La Bota
Esteban Rodríguez
In Leticia’s Kitchen Drawer
Peggy Robles-Alvarado
When We Were 13, Jeff’s Father Left the Needle Down on a Journey Record Before Leaving the House One Morning and Never Coming Back
Hanif Abdurraqib
Leaving Early
Leanne O’Sullivan
Seventh Circle of Earth
Ocean Vuong
Song
Tracy K. Smith
Coconut Oil
Roshni Goyate
The Place Where We Are Right
Yehuda Amichai (Trans. Stephen Mitchell)
What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade
Brad Aaron Modlin
Life Drawing
R. A. Villanueva
Consider the Hands that Write this Letter
Aracelis Girmay
Living in the Past
Joy Ladin
On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Bioluminescence
Paul Tran
Notes on the Poets
Acknowledgements
Permission Credits
About On Being
To Krista Tippett and Paul Doran
with all kinds of thanks and all kinds of love.
I pray for this to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body’s position to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.
Aracelis Girmay
. . . in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.
Christian Wiman
Poetry Unbound
Introduction
A poem is a difficult thing to define. What is it? It’s a little block of ink on a page, sometimes five lines long, sometimes fifty. It’s a house of memory. It’s a clockwork thing you can carry in your pocket; take it out, set it to go, and it goes. Tick-tock-tick-tock, it says, sometimes rhyming with itself. Some poems are full of love, and some of anger; some poems remember things that shouldn’t be forgotten, other poems fantasise about the future, acting as a warning for today. Some sound like a song, others like a story.
All poems use craft; careful choice of words, linebreaks, metaphor and form. I love these elements of poetry, but I know that such technicalities are not the only way to love a poem. Most people remember a poem because it reminds them of something: a grief of their own; a moment of love in their life; a decision they had to make; a time of wonder and delight; a landscape they had forgotten; a pain they carried. Somehow, those little clockworks get into the heart, and help it go, help it rhyme, help it in ways we can’t define.
This book contains fifty poems. Fifty little doors opening up to the world of the poet. And fifty little doors to open up the world of a reader.
A poem is often made up of stanzas, and stanza is the Italian word for room. Many rooms are populated with things: a chair, a window, a mirror, a painting, a broken toy, the remains of a fire, the evidence of love or its opposites, a child’s drawing, a forgotten report card, a scent that reminds you of your grandmother. The poems in this book form a series of rooms through which to walk where the walls have stories and the furniture can talk, rooms that invite in your person and your intelligence, your own memories, associations, fantasies, desires and pain. The poems are not designed to make your life easier, even though many of them will; they are designed to notice and observe, to take stock, to reckon, to breathe, to rest, to stir and work.
Each poem is introduced with an anecdote of how I’ve needed poetry in my life. Then, in the short essays following the poems, I write about the poet’s craft and their choice of form, the way they’ve shaped language to do the work that I think is important to them. Sometimes I use recollections from my life to reflect on how the poem speaks to me. My hope is that the poems will intersect with the stories of your own life, too; allowing you to step inside, to notice what you notice.
The poems in Poetry Unbound speak to the variety of human experience, sometimes exploring common ground, sometimes not: in one, Hanif Abdurraqib looks back to his childhood, remembering when a friend’s mother threw her wedding ring out of the window of a car after the end of a marriage. In the background of this memory is a song in which the poet recognises his own grief. Maybe I shouldn’t say a poem is a door between two rooms. Maybe it’s twenty doors: what it means to remember yourself as a teenager; what it means to be an adult; what music works in us; how grief is a complicated ghost; how a crowd of friends crammed in the back seat of the car is a whole world.
Gail McConnell’s poem ‘Worm’ is not written about a worm, but to one, the ‘you’ of the poem. I never knew I’d need a poem to a worm, but I do, because through this poem, I understand that the worm has learned to ingest everything it comes across. It goes through. It makes life in underground places. Us too.
Poetry Unbound contains poems about prayer, pain and power: Faisal Mohyuddin’s ‘Prayer’ calls God a ‘perfect / emptiness’; Lorna Goodison’s ‘Reporting Back to Queen Isabella’ imagines a roomful of colonialists who imagined themselves as explorers; Leanne O’Sullivan’s ‘Leaving Early’ is in the form of a letter from a woman to her husband – she’s leaving him in the hospital for a night, going home, entrusting him to the care of a beloved nurse. Reginald Dwayne Betts’s ‘Essay on Reentry’ is also set in the middle of the night: a man and his sleepless son watch cartoons with the sound turned down, a complicated conversation looming between them.
Some poems address huge topics: history, seeking asylum, religion, war, grief, ecology. Other poems are from a small corner of a poet’s life: meeting a stranger on a street, making bread, self-forgiveness. Some address themes of abandonment, or remember a friendly animal. Poetry is about the human condition: everything from the kitchen drawer to the state of the world can be subject matter for a poem.
The poets in Poetry Unbound are from many places – Jamaica, Ireland, the United States, Australia, Iran, Puerto Rico, England, Israel. Included are poets from the diaspora, colonised countries, occupied countries, poets in exile, poets who have never travelled much, and poets who’ve been forced to travel to – or through – many places. Many of the poets hold more than one national identity. There is no such thing as one global universal voice. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman asserted.
I chose these fifty poems because together they help us to see what can happen when we pay attention to our lives. They are mostly from living poets; some at the start of their publishing career, others well-published. All the poems are a testament to the process of noticing. A single moment can open a door to an experience that’s bigger than the single moment might imply. Sometimes that opening is a challenge, sometimes it’s a comfort, other times a question. Very occasionally it’s an answer.
The voice in a poem isn’t necessarily the voice of the poet, nor is the scene being described necessarily true to life. Poets take imaginative leaps, and the experiences they write about are not always based on their own lives. Hence, I refer to the voice as ‘the speaker’ when I write about the speaking voice in individual poems. Patience Agbabi, for instance, speaks in the voice of the patriarch Isaac. It’s a personal poem. It’s not the poet, but it’s not not her either; she’s in control of the speaking voice, or perhaps the voice is in control of her. Often this kind of poem is call