August 2012

Over the last few years I have listened to many of the Poetry Archive recordings and my six poems are taken from those voices, literal and poetic, which stood out and have remained with me. I wanted my selection to be fresh and contemporary – (only Rubaiyat was published before 2004) – and to reflect the great diversity of voice, content, form and language in the Poetry Archive. I have chosen poets who use language that intrigued, startled, moved me, and who in W.H.Auden’s words ‘say something significant about a reality common to us all.’ . . . .

Who He Was - part V by Dan Burt This is the final poem in a sequence about the colossus that was Burt’s father in ‘the orbit / of whose fists’ he grew up, a man who ‘policed /a patriarch’s long list of rights’ and who is now reduced to ‘the skeleton in a wheelchair’ ineffectually dangling a fishing line. Read in Burt’s quietly American voice which is both vigorous and tender, clarity of vision and feeling is combined with a complementary precision of muscular, searing words. Detail is intensely visual: ‘blue slashes / flashing toward the bait’ conveys exactly through onomatopoeia and the line break the quick, bright movements of the fish. However, it’s the father who rides this poem, presented to us in an initial 11-line rolling sentence alive with sibilants, culminating in that awful dehumanised ‘sutured rag doll’: reality scoured clean. There seems to be; tenderness in laying him down in his fishing clothes, but even beyond death, it is ‘by his command’.

RACHEL REDFORD