Me... a poetry anothology? must be course work...

Ok,

part of my OU course on poetry is to create an anthology of poems, culled from an anthology of animal orientated poetry...

The Bear - Frost (p23 - 24) beautiful imagery, hidden in a simple rhyming structure (though the repetition of Greek amuses, its as if he runs out of words)

Blue Moles - Plath (p39 - 40) more beautiful imagery, though perhaps vivid would be a better description

I have a Gentle Cock - Anon (p 126 - 127) made me laugh, and the switch between the straight description of the animal and then innuendo of the last line is stunning:-)

On a Dog of Lord Eglinton's - Burns (p188) the simile of a dog's life is pointedly made

Widgeon - Heaney (284) - Euwwww

In the Introduction to the Book of Beasts, the anthologist describes anthologists as despots, and maybe I am... My anthology is based on what attracted me in a single scan read through. So they tend to be shorter, punchier and cause an immediate emotional reaction - be that a smile in Frost description of the Bear's "fundamental butt", or the heart wrenching imagery of the dead moles by Plath. I have a Gentle Cock appeals (I freely confess) to the school boy in me, and from the last line, where you go from a description of a cockerel to something far more suggestive, I suspect the long forgotten author as well.

Burn's use of simile struck me as pointed and poignant - and I could imagine the same thoughts going on behind the soft brown eye of a hunting dog looking across a hall at the human animals around the piste.

And Heaney, well the idea of using the windpipe of a half dead bird as a flute is always going to cause an emotional reaction...

So a completely different blog from normal... It even gets a bibliography...

Muldoon, P. (Ed) (1997) The Faber Book of Beasts. London. Faber & Faber

TTFN

Paul

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