Liam Guilar's 'Akhmatova's requiem'

I read the poem Requiem by Anna Akhmatova on a previous podcast.

Several things made this poem happen. WHile Akhmatova lived through Stalin’s times, many of the people who persecuted her are now forgotten, they are just ‘footnotes in her history’.

I used her poem as part of a unit on poetry in translation. I would tell the story of how, when it was being written, she would write the new verses on cigarette paper. She would show them silently to her friend, who would nod when she had memorised the lines, then they would burn the paper.

Classes often found this most moving part of her story.

But at the end of every lesson, there’d be at least one of the printed copies of the poem left in the classroom, often dropped on the floor. Once one of the papers had a foot print on it.

The poem first appeared in the Irish Journal , The SHOp, and was then chosen for ‘The SHOp, An Anthology of Poetry’, their ‘best of’ collection.

Liam Guilar's 'These heroics One and Two'.

Two poems, written some years apart.

The modern admiration for the action hero seems like a childish escape into fantasy, until you realise the implications. Real heroism, the courage to keep going on a daily basis where there is no simple victory, no cheering crowd, no prize, goes unnoticed.

These heroics number one is takes from I’ll Howl before you bury me. These heroics number two from Rough spun to Close Weave.

Both are still available from www.liamguilar.com

(A note on pronunciation. There are at least two ways of pronouncing Cuchulainn. I naturalised mine from Irish speakers I grew up with. At university I was told: ‘Oh Guilar, you mean Kah Hool lin’. He said it in such a patronising way, in his Bow Tie English Accent, that I have stuck with what I started with. )

Susan Watson's 'Why she began to study the works of Sir Thomas Malory'.

Susan Watson

The Time of the Angels is a sequence of poems in which a young woman reads and re-reads Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur during the winter and spring of 1979. She is researching and writing an undergraduate dissertation, but her encounter with Malory is also a highly personal one; she perceives the centrality of ‘chances, choices, prophecies, destinies, past and future time’ and responds to an atmosphere of ‘loss soaking backwards through the pages like a tide receding’. And there is Malory’s voice: ‘a plain voice, threading beads’.

The Pamphlet is available by clicking here: Doing so will open a new window.

Liam Guilar's 'Byron In Venice: The poet in Exile.'

The Grand Canal in Venice

 Byron in Venice

(The poet in exile)

 The debris of a city in decline
slops at the crumbling steps,
as the sun sets over palaces 
even dusk can’t dignify.

 The clock strikes, he puts down the page
and calls for servants. Suddenly
cannot remember if he is to meet
the opera singer or the serving maid.

 No matter how elaborate the choreography,
his hands run free, his mind completes the rhyme.
Afterwards, duty done, excuses made, 
he’ll coax these stanzas to their climax 

 and scrawl defiance on the blank of time’s indifference,
graffiti on the walls of history. 
He has explored the tangled pathways of his heart
and written travelogues for those who stayed at home. 

If that leads here, to age and desolation;
the fading light, broken on the Grand Canal,
where life is repetition, and even lust grows stale;
the boys and women he has loved 

the friends he misses as he dines alone,
faded signatures on bundled letters,
locks of hair, old arguments the night returns;
if it leads here; beyond the poem, what remains? 

An aging face, once beautiful,  
staring through its own reflection,
soliciting an audience
to dignify the commonplace as art?

I wrote it after reading Byron’s letters. All twelve volumes. I was thinking about what it means to write, to live abroad, to use writing to organise memory. What happens when a commonplace experience or emotion is written about by a master like Byron? Is there any point to writing poetry?

The poem is taken from ‘From Rough Spun to Close Weave’. Signed copies are available from the shop at

www. Liamguilar.com Otherwise available at online book sellers.

Luis Quintais' 'Amphitheatre' (trans Lesley Saunders)

Luis Quintais (1968-)

You can read about Luis Quintais, a poet writing in Portuguese as well as this translation and four other others by clicking on the link below. It will open in a new page..

https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/15/poems-by-luis-quintais-translated-from-the-portuguese-by-lesley-saunders/

This is a good example of what happens when one fine poet translates another. We live in a great age of translation. Which means we have access to poetry in languages you’ve probably never considered

from Mathew Francis' 'The Mabinogi' Rhiannon's arrival

Mathew Francis ( Born 1956)

Rhiannon: ‘a woman wearing a shining garment of brocaded silk on a big, fine, pale white horse’..

This extract is taken from ‘The Mabinogi’, (Faber 2017), Francis’ retelling of the first four stories in the collection of eleven Medieval Welsh prose stories printed in English as The Mabinogion. The Mabinogi is the name given to the first four stories.

In this extract from the first story, Pwyll, who is prince of Dyfed, has been told that if he sits on Gorsedd Arberth, a hill overlooking his court, one of two things will happen: wounds or blows, or he will see a wonder. Because he is with an armed retinue he isn’t worried about being struck and wounded. As they sit on the hill, they see a rider approaching.

Although she seems to be ambling past, the boy sent to run after her cannot catch her. On the second day Pwyll sends a rider. No matter how fast threader drives his horse, she increases the gap between them without changing her pace.

On the third day Pwyll himself tries to catch her, and is failing miserably when he asks her to stop.

Gladly she says, and it would have been better for your horse if you’d asked a lot sooner.

Francis’ poem is not a translation, but a retelling that stays close to the original. But he captures the dreamlike quality of the original, and suggests that what we’re reading is both event and metaphor.

You can read a brief discussion the whole book here: here

(Clicking on the link will take you to a page on WWW.Liamguilar.com).

If you want to read a prose version of The Mabinogion in modern English, Sioned Davis’ version for Oxford World Classics (2008/2018) is justifiably famous.

Liam Guilar's 'Just once'

The household fire.

‘Coke’ in this sense, is fuel for a fire. Thought cleaner than coal, it was much harder to light.

This poem is taken from Rough Spun to Close Weave which is still available from online booksellers or direct from www.Liamguilar.com.



from Christopher Logue's 'War Music'. 1 Patroculus pleads with Achilles.

Christopher Logue (1926-2011)

A fine poet in his own work, Logue’s most lasting achievement should be his ‘account’ of Homer’s Iliad.

Logue never called his work a translation. In 1959 he was asked to translate a section of the Iliad for a radio performance.  In his memoire, ‘Prince Charming’ (p.221), he relates that when he pointed out he knew no Greek, he was told:. ‘Read translations by those who did. Follow the story. A translator must know one language well. Preferably his own.’ It is an unusual piece of advice, and not one usually given to translators.

The results however were spectacular, appearing as separate books, until in 2016 they were collected and published as ‘War Music; an account of Homer’s illiad’. I would describe it as one of the great narrative achievements in English Poetry.

Although neither finished nor pedantically ‘accurate’, it makes Homer seem attractive. However, as an introduction to Homer its one drawback is that it makes the standard translations of the Iliad seem very dull.

Carol Ann Duffy's 'You'

Carol Ann Duffy (1955-)

This is the first poem in Duffy’s ‘Rapture’ (2005), which is either a book length love poem or a book length sequence of poems which chart the rise and fall of a passionate love affair. ‘Rapture’ won the T.S.Eliot Prize in 2005.

For many people the relationship between love and poetry seems a simple one. But of the thousands of poems written each day, and the thousands published each year, there are very few good love poems. As an experiment, pick up a general anthology of English poetry through the ages and see how many you can find. As is often pointed out: ‘I love you’ may be the most beautiful thing you’ll ever say, or hear, but it’s not a poem.

Because of this, ‘Rapture’ is an outstanding collection, as the poems move from ‘Love’s first plague to her wintry fever’.