Poem for Today - June 08

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June 08

June's poems group themselves around the theme of living with suffering.

The theorist Theodor Adorno famously said that to write a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric. We discuss this thought on the 18th and 19th with poems from Geoffrey Hill in memory of the holocaust and a poem by Paul Celan about being in a work camp. Earlier Thomas Hardy and Dom Moraes envision the end of things, Franz Kafka examines the strange fact that desire can be the only affirmation of life, and James Fenton, John Gillespie Magee,Stephen Crane, W B Yeats and Anna Akhmatova speak of living through conflict.

We also have poems celebrating new life - from Kate Clanchy on the 11th, and Amy Clampitt on the 16th, as well as famous memorials of death from Thomas Gray, Paul Muldoon and Anna Akhmatova.

The month ends with summer and boyhood - descriptions from Britiish poets including Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin and BarryTebb and Americans - Charles Simic and James Whitcomb Riley,

Enjoy!

June

2	Dom Moraes Thomas Hardy	Indian English	Absences We are Getting to the End
3	Franz Kafka Kate	Czech ?	from The Castle Desire
4	James Fenton Nazim Hikmet	English Turkish	Tianenmen Prague Dawn
5	Sinead Morrissey Stephen Crane	Irish American	The Wound Man The Ocean Said to Me Once
6	Maxine Kumin	American	The Hermit Goes Up Attic
9	John Gillespie Magee	American	High Flight We Laid Him Per Ardua
10	Christopher Middleton	English	At Portcothan
11	Kate Clanchy	Scottish	In a Prospect of Flowers New Born, Not Art
12	Thomas Gray	English	Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard
13	W B Yeats	Irish	Under Ben Bulben
16	Amy Clampitt	American	The Sun Underfoot among the Sundews The Waterfall
17	Gwendolyn Brooks	American	The Lovers of the Poor
18	Geoffrey Hill	English	Two Formal Elegies September Song
19	Paul Celan	Romanian	Death Fugue
20	Paul Muldoon	N Irish	In Memory of My Father Quoof
23	Anna Akhmatova	Russian	Solitude The Publication of a Book You Are to Live
24	Dylan Thomas	Welsh	Fern Hill
25	Dylan Thomas	Welsh	I See the Boys of Summer
26	W E Henley Philip Larkin James Whitcomb Riley	English English American	Between the Dusk Mother, Summer, I A Summer Afternoon
27	Charles Simic Barry Tebb	American English	Summer in the Country Summer with Margaret
30	Sophie Hannah	English	Triskaidekaphobia Ante-Natal

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