You Will Love Again the Stranger Who Was Your Selfã¢â‚¬â
Ailbhe Darcy
What other words could there be for what I felt, at 13 or and so, when I laid optics on a certain "gilt, night boy", merely Chimborazo, Cotopaxi? Certain, these words may at times accept been arbitrarily attached to other, more mountainy objects, but here, in this poem, they discover their true dwelling.
I met my future husband at 19, and I wrote this poem in a notebook for him. By then it had already been echoing around within me for years, telling me the truth virtually honey. (Honey is monomaniacal, love is bloodcurdling, beloved is secret, love is childish, love rips you from the bosom of your family unit, dear is woozy, dearest is ravishing, love is scrumdiddlyumptious.)
I should probably feel embarrassed at telling Ireland that this is my favourite love poem, simply am unabashed. There are many fine poems about the grown-up parts of love, simply it's as infatuated teenagers that we learn romance, and as infatuated teenagers that we practice romance, all the rest of our lives. I don't suppose a marriage could amount to much if it didn't have a pair of infatuated teenagers subconscious in it.
Ailbhe Darcy'southward two collections are Imaginary Menagerie (2011) and Insistence (due May 2018), both with Bloodaxe
Romance
past WJ Turner
When I was but thirteen or so
I went into a golden land,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Took me by the hand.
My begetter died, my brother too,
They passed like fleeting dreams,
I stood where Popocatapetl
In the sunlight gleams.
I dimly heard the master'due south voice
And boys far-off at play, –
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had stolen me away.
I walked in a cracking golden dream
To and fro from school –
Shining Popocatapetl
The dusty streets did rule.
I walked domicile with a aureate nighttime boy
And never a discussion I'd say,
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
Had taken my speech abroad.
I gazed entranced upon his face
Fairer than whatever flower—
O shining Popocatapetl
It was thy magic hr:
The houses, people, traffic seemed
Thin fading dreams past twenty-four hour period;
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi,
They had stolen my soul away!
Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh
The Gaelic tradition doesn't indulge in the schmaltz of St Valentine. The searing, heart-twisting pain of separation is more commonly featured in Gaelic love poetry, such as in the devastating lines of Dónal Óg:
Bhain tú thoir díom is bhain tú thiar díom,
Bhain tú an ghealach is bhain tú an ghrian díom,
Bhain tú an croí geal a bhí i mo chliabh díom,
Is is rí-mhór m'fhaitíos gur bhain tú Dia díom.
For unadulterated sensuality, I refer you to any number of poems by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, although Fáilte bhéal na Sionna don iasc does finish on a surprisingly tender note:
Is seinnim seoithín
practice mo leannán
tonn ar thonn
leathrann ar leathrann,
mo thine ghealáin mar bhairlín thíos faoi
mo rogha a thoghas féin ón iasacht.
Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh'south latest collection is The Coast Road (Gallery Press, 2016)
Theo Dorgan
She tells her love while one-half asleep
past Robert Graves
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Globe turns in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
I know of no short poem in the English language linguistic communication that packs and then much magic and memorability into so few lines, except perhaps for Betimes's masterpiece (mistress-piece?), the early 16th-century lyric known as Western Wind.
Both poems share a deceptive simplicity of diction and seductive cadence, the evocation of the natural globe as the proper theatre of beloved, and an air of the mysterious – simply the Graves lyric, I think, reaches even farther and deeper into the psychic hinterland of besotted beloved than does the earlier poem. Information technology catches perfectly the trance of new love, perhaps love as yet undeclared, the dawning realisation implied in "one-half-words", the reticence and succulent hesitation of one who right at present, right hither is discovering herself, or himself, new-fledged in dear.
The shift in scale that permits identification with the World turning towards rebirth in bound is brought perfectly home in the verse form'due south masterstroke, the repetition of "Despite the snow" and, even more, the intermission of time in that amplifiying "falling". A perfect verse form.
Theo Dorgan's latest collection is Nine Bright Shiners
Medbh McGuckian
When one was sweet and twenty something , clutching at the straw of one's virginity, it was Yeats'due south lessons in lovesex that hit home, from "Brown penny, one cannot begin information technology likewise presently," to the adoring grandmother in When y'all are Old. Paul Muldoon's clever-clever Cuba focused on a Cosmic family in the nuclear '60s subverting puritanical denials and frustrations with a gesture of tenderness. The girl in it does non escape, whereas in John Francis Waller'southward Victorian ballad, The Spinning Wheel Song, the maid Eileen woos her grandmother into drowsiness with her own affectionate singing (all incorrect according to the old woman), lulls her and leaps out in a bid for freedom to rove in the moonlight with her truthful dearest.
Being myself a protective grandmother now, I mind learning this dirge equally a child of 8 and being seduced past the patterns and interweaving tunes of the sounds,the work concealing the lovemaking, the rhymes and inversions twisting the Irish gaelic out of the English language.
Medbh McGuckian'southward latest collection is Love, the Magician (Arlen Business firm, 2018)
Enda Wyley
Some of the finest, nearly moving dear poems in the world take grown out of desolation and isolation. And still, the correct honey poem is strangely reassuring. Someone else has felt like the states and has really survived to write about it. Of a sudden we know we are not solitary. Suddenly we can brand the love poem our own. Hither is a favourite, a simple four line love lyric which I take e'er admired. It aches with loneliness and longing and is brusque but unforgettable. That the poet is anonymous, adds farther to the mystery of the piece written about 1530.
Western wind, when volition grand blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! If my dearest were in my artillery,
And I in my bed again!
Enda Wyley'southward latest collection is Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems (2014)
Peter Sirr
When it comes to love poems I like to become back to the source of it all: the troubadours of southern France who kicked off the entire tradition of the lyric love poem every bit we know information technology, poets like Bernart de Ventadorn or Arnaut Daniel who inspired Dante so much he considered writing in Occitan. Dante, Petrarch, Ronsard, Marie de France, Gearóid Iarla, Yeats, Graves and everyone who writes under the sway of love today feels the hot jiff of the troubadours on the backs of their necks. Some of the best of the poetry was written by women. Hither'south one from the 13th century, past Beatriz, Countess of Dia, which I translated for a book I did chosen Sway: Versions of poems from the troubadour tradition.
Peter Sirr'due south latest collection is The Rooms (Gallery Press, 2014)
How I'd like him …
Estat ai en greu cossirier
How I'd like him
oh
how I would similar him my
condescending
even if for a single night
naked in my artillery
his caput resting on my lap
I love him, more
than Floris loved Blanchflor
I did non tell him this
Everyone, anybody should know
To him I gave my heart my soul
my reason my optics my life
My tender beautiful cavalier
when volition I have you for myself?
For one night simply
naked in your arms
If you could just take
my married man'due south place
and swear to me you'll reply
when I telephone call, and mind my desire.
Kevin Higgins
My favourite love poem is Mayakovsky's By i o'clock. It was written to his on-off lover Lily Brik. The lines "Love's boat has smashed against the daily grind. / Now you and I are quits" always get me considering they were annihilation but "quits". In 1990 it was revealed Lily was NKVD amanuensis 15073 and had been informing the authorities near his disillusionment with the regime of that overnice Mr Stalin. The poem was left as a note when Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930. It appeals because, big eejit that I used to be, I once had a trend to fall for the likes of Lily.
Kevin Higgins'south latest drove is Vocal od Songs 2.0 (Salmon Poetry)
Past ane o'clock
by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1930)
translated by Max Hayward and George Reavey
Past one o'clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Mode streams argent through the night.
I'm in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no crusade to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love'south boat has smashed against the daily grind.
At present you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance common sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Dark wraps the heaven in tribute from the stars.
In hours similar these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.
Aifric Mac Aodha
For my starter, Seán Dunne'due south Letter to Lisbon because of where the "just" comes here: "to touch your sleeve at present/ would only be plenty".
And for my mains, Grand'anam exercise sgar riomsa a-raoir (My soul parted from me last night) by Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh, who mourns his first honey, a dazzler who bore him 11 children and with whom the chat only improved. The poem is specially good when his married woman's empty couch-bed reminds him of better times: "tárramair corp seada saor/ is folt claon, a leaba, id lár" (nosotros take seen a tall noble form/ with waving tresses upon thee, O burrow.) For all its cliches, that last one'southward a winner – it would stir the pulse and race the heart.
Aifric Mac Aodha's latest drove is Foreign News (Gallery Press, 2017)
Louis de Paor
As it gets harder to tell the ventriloquists and their dummies apart, it helps to remind myself I'one thousand from the same place as Jimmy Barry-Spud, Rory Gallagher, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Patrick Galvin: no fake; no lie; no alibi. Ó Ríordáin said Galvin's poems were "fíochmhar, neamhscrupallach, contúirteach" [vehement, unscrupulous, dangerous]. Technique is neither here nor there, he said: when you read Galvin's The Madwoman of Cork, nothing else exists. The same could be said of my favourite love verse form, Plaisir D'Flirtation, where the mismatched couple are a perfect match. Paddy said his female parent loved the poem and his male parent hated it. Better once again.
Louis de Paor's work includes Agus Rud Eile De/And Some other Thing (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 2010)
Plaisir d'Amour
by Patrick Galvin
Bound
My father
Against the victories of age
Would not concede defeat
He dyed his pilus
And when my female parent called
He said he wasn't there.
My mother, too
Fought back against the years
Simply in her Sunday prayers
Apologised to God.
My father said at that place was no God
"And that one knows it to her painted toes"
My mother smiled.
She'd plucked her eyebrows too
And wore a run across-through skirt
With matching vest.
"He likes French knickers all-time," she said
"I'll have them blest."
My father raged.
He liked his women young, he said
And not half-dead.
He bought a second-mitt guitar he couldn't play
And sang the but song he knew –
Plaisir d'Amour.
Summer
When summer came
My father left the firm
He tied a ribbon in his hair
And wore a Kaftan clothes.
My female parent watched him walking downwards the street
"He'll break his cervix in that," she said –
"As if I care."
He toured the world
And met a guru in Tibet.
"I've slept with women as well," he wrote
"And they not half my age."
My mother threw his alphabetic character in the burn down –
"The lying ghett – he couldn't climb the stairs
With all his years"
She burned her bra
And wrote with lipstick on a card –
"I've got two sailors in the house
From Martinique.
They've got your children'south optics."
My male parent didn't wait to reply that
He came dorsum home.
And sitting by the burn down
He said he'd lied
He'd never slept with anyone but her.
My mother said she'd never lied herself –
She'd thrown the sailors out an hour before he came.
My father'southward middle would never exist the aforementioned –
Plaisir d'Amour.
Autumn
Through autumn days
My father felt the leaves
Burning in the corners of his mind.
My mother, who was younger by a year,
Looked young and fair,
The sailors from the port of Martinique
Had kissed her cheek
He searched the business firm
And hidden in a trunk beneath the bed
My father found his second-hand guitar.
He found her come across-through brim
With matching belong.
"Yous wore French knickers once," he said
"I liked them best."
"I gave them all away," my female parent cried
"To sailors and to captains of the sea.
I'thousand not half-expressionless
I'grand fit for any bed – including yours."
She wore a sailor's cap
And danced effectually the room
While father strummed his second-hand guitar.
He made the bed,
He wore his Kaftan dress
A ribbon in his hair.
"I'll play it one more time," he said
"And you can sing."
She sang the only song they knew –
Plaisir d'Flirtation.
Winter
At 60-four
My mother died
At threescore-v
My male parent.
Comment from a neighbour
Who was there:
"They'd laissez passer for twenty."
Plaisir d'Flirtation
Thomas McCarthy
Beloved possesses poets similar no other feeling. In contempo years the dear poem that has virtually startled me and moved me is Vona Groarke's middle-rending Ghost Poem from her Gallery Press book 10. That X could be an Ex. or x bad things that can happen to love. The poem is a reclamation of sensuous feelings, their ghostlike impressions and markings upon a lover's trunk. The skill with which Groarke layers those feelings is astonishing. Ghostly attachment makes "your life and mine/ that I made up and lived inside". Anyone who has lost in love will get this poem instantly.
Ghost Poem
past Vona Groarke
Crowded at my window tonight, your ghosts
will accept nothing to speak of merely love
though the long grass leading to my door
is parted neither past yous leaving
nor past you coming hither. The same ghosts
go on in with my blood, the fashion
a small name says itself, over
and over, then i minute is clangorous
compared to the next, and I cannot locate
words plenty to tell you your wrist
on my breast had the same two sounds to it.
You lot are a sky over narrow water
and the ghosts at my window
are a full day until I shed their loss.
I want to tell you all their bone-white,
straight-line prophecies
but the thought of y'all, this and every nighttime,
is your veins in silverpoint mapped
on my peel, your life on mine,
that I made upward and lived inside, every bit real,
and I find I cannot speak of love
or any of its wind-torn ghosts to you
who promised warm sheets and a candle, lit,
but promised me in words.
Vona Groarke, Ten (Gallery Press)
Tom Paulin
To Lizbie Browne may seem an odd choice of a love poem. I first encountered information technology in Dylan Thomas'southward great reading on an EP which my English teacher, Eric Brown, played to u.s. in Belfast in the mid-sixties. It haunted me and later I came to see it as cardinal, obsessive, even fetishistic.
Partly, I responded to that "Aye" – "Yeah", simply with a hint of "ochone". The word has a pause later it and this prepares usa for for the manner the penultimate line pauses and and then completes itself with "Beloved", which is emphatic and in a fashion heart-rending.
The two emphatic stresses on "Bay-red" tense the third stanza which softens into the Anglo-Saxon, slightly erotic, "mankind so off-white".
The poem is witty and in "coaxed and caught" slightly sinister. It succeeds in existence both tender and self-mocking.
Tom Paulin's latest work is New Selected Poems (Faber, 2014)
To Lizbie Browne
I
Dear Lizbie Browne,
Where are you now?
In sun, in rain,? –
Or is your brow
Past joy, by hurting,
Dear Lizbie Browne?
Ii
Sweetness Lizbie Browne,
How you could grin,
How you could sing! -
How archly wile
In glance-giving,
Sweet Lizbie Browne!
Iii
And, Lizbie Browne
Who else had hair
Bay-ruby as yours,
Or mankind so Off-white
Bred out of doors,
Sweetness Lizbie Browne!
Four
When, Lizbie Browne
You had just begun
To be endeared
By stealth to ane,
You lot disappeared
My Lizbie Browne!
V
Yes, Lizbie Browne,
So swift your life,
And mine so slow,
You were a married woman
Ere I could evidence
Love, Lizbie Browne.
Half-dozen
Still, Lizbie Browne,
Y'all won, they said,
The best of men
When you were wed ...
Where went y'all so,
O Lizbie Browne?
VII
Dear Lizbie Browne,
I should accept thought,
'Girls ripen fast,'
And coaxed and defenseless
Yous ere you passed,
Dear Lizbie Browne!
VIII
Merely, Lizbie Browne,
I permit yous slip;
Shaped not a sign;
Touched never your lip
With lip of mine,
Lost Lizbie Browne!
Nine
So, Lizbie Browne,
When on a day
Men speak of me
As not, you'll say
'And who was he?'
Yes, Lizbie Browne!
Elaine Feinstein
They Flee From Me
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
They abscond from me that sometime did me seek
With naked human foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and exercise not think
That onetime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my paw; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual modify.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times meliorate; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and pocket-sized;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, "Honey centre, how like y'all this?"
Information technology was no dream: I lay broad waking.
Merely all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a foreign fashion of forsaking;
And I have exit to go of her goodness,
And she likewise, to utilise newfangleness.
Simply since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
I've always loved this poem. You lot could argue it is unuitable for Valentine's Day, since Wyatt begins from his sense of rejection by the many women he has loved. He recalls them every bit wild creatures who once "stalked with naked foot within my chamber" and were willing to "have breadstuff at my hands" with the gentle sensuality a man might feel for a tamed creature. All the more astonishing then to have him remembering one woman above all the others who throws off her clothes and takes sweet command of a sexual encounter. Few poems evoke more powerfully the strength and tenderness of concrete dearest, nonetheless much Wyatt goes on to blame his lover for her "newfangleness" in going her own way.
Elaine Feinstein'south latest collection is The Clinic Memory: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet)
Julia Copus
My husband, Andrew, read John Donne's The Expert Morrow to me during our wedding ceremony and I managed not to weep, though it'due south one of my all-fourth dimension favourite dearest poems. Some other is The Shampoo by Elizabeth Bishop, a verse form about the robust permanence of beloved; it ends with the speaker offering to launder her lover'due south hair in a bowl that is "battered and shiny like the moon". But I want to single out Don Paterson's timeless sonnet, Waking with Russell, about a new father waking in bed confront to face with his four-day-old son. At the mid-point of the poem, the speaker says he is mezzo del cammin – a quotation from Dante'south Inferno meaning "in the heart of the journey". The whole thing is exquisitely crafted (at that place are only two rhymes throughout, though people usually don't notice on first reading) but it's the emotional power that makes this such a great love poem. And although it's written for a specific situation, that unexpected rediscovery of dear in the eye of life's journey is something that resonates strongly with many readers.
Julia Copus'south works include The Globe's Ii Smallest Humans (Faber, 2012), shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Costa Poesy Award
Waking with Russell
By Don Paterson
Whatever the difference is, it all began
the mean solar day we woke up confront-to-confront similar lovers
and his 4-day-quondam smile dawned on him once more,
possessed him, till it would non autumn or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
simply his own grin, or i I'd rediscovered.
Love son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me equally ever
when you cut in front end and lit it as y'all ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through united states of america like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking among men!
I kissed your oral cavity and pledged myself forever.
Christopher Reid
So many love poems are concerned with the exciting preliminaries: first glimpse, coup de foudre, wooing, and winning or losing; as well few celebrate what follows. Part of Plenty by Bernard Spencer (1909-63) is a great, uxorious exception. The poet describes his wife (I have it) bringing food to the table ("soup with its good / Tickling smell, or fry winking from the burn") and placing tulips in a jug ("upright stems and leaves that you hear creak") in a style that brings all the senses into harmony, hearing and smell no less than sight. He proceeds like a painter, coaxing coherence from disparate elements. The concluding stanza, in a risky gesture typical of Spencer, confounds both syntax and grammer to suggest an uncontrolled blurting out of joy, a matrimonial ecstasy that obeys but its ain laws. I find this ingenious, profound and moving.
Christopher Reid won the 2009 Costa Book Award for A Scattering
Part of Plenty
by Bernard Spencer
When she carries food to the table and stoops downward
--Doing this out of love--and lays soup with its adept
Tickling aroma, or fry winking from the burn
And I look up, perhaps from a book I am reading
Or other work: there is an importance of dazzler
Which tin't be accounted for by at that place and then,
And attacks me, but not separately from the welcome
Of the food, or the grace of her arms.
When she puts a sheaf of tulips in a jug
And pours in water and presses to one side
The upright stems and leaves that you hear creak,
Or loosens them, or holds them upward to show me,
Then that I see the tangle of their necks and cups
With the curls of her pilus, and the torso they are held
Against, and the stalk of the small waist ascension
And flowering in the shape of breasts;
Whether in the bringing of the flowers or of the food
She offers plenty, and is part of enough,
And whether I run across her stooping, or leaning with the flowers,
What she does is ages one-time, and she is not merely,
No, but lovely in that way.
(from Complete Verse, ed. Peter Robinson, Bloodaxe, 2011)
John McAuliffe
I honey the way Thomas Wyatt, even when he is abandoned and has to admit, "They flee from me that some time did me seek", can still recollect, or cannot forget, what has gotten him into such trouble:
In sparse array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did autumn,
And she me caught in her arms long and minor;
Therewithall sweetly did me osculation
And softly said, "Honey heart, how like yous this?"
I seem to go back to love poems whose pleasure is salted by something else, a feeling oftentimes found in poems I studied in translation, in Lorca, or the Former English Wulf and Eadwacer ("What was never bound is broken easily, / our song together.").
More recently, the dearest poem seems to accept emerged from the shadows over again. The bright line-up of poets reading at the Cork International Verse Festival this weekend features DA Powell whose rueful, heartsore poems include Abandonment Nether the Walnut Tree ("Do whatever information technology is you lot'd like to practise." he says "Be quick.") and only as good on beloved is his compatriot Carl Phillips, with his most deranged extension of want into everything he touches in poems like For information technology Felt Like Power,
But my favourite contemporary honey verse form, which has something Wyatt-like, charged and mysterious well-nigh it, is Lavinia Greenlaw'south Essex Kiss, which moves from detail,
A touch as bold as rum and peppermint.
Chewing gum and whelks. A whiff
of diesel, crocus, cuckoo spit.
to
Your body will give mode like grain,
your body will veer
smoke over a torched field
as the air current takes and turns it.
And a closing couplet whose con and pro take their fourth dimension to balance and sink in:
Past this are nosotros leap.
No paperwork.
John McAuliffe'due south fourth book is The Way In (Gallery, 2015). He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/love-poems-for-one-night-only-naked-in-your-arms-14-poets-pick-their-favourites-1.3385035
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