Poems for Christmas

For me, the greatest gift of the Christmas season is time to read. The offices and schools are closed. This year, pubs, restaurants, shops and cinemas will be off the menu for many, too. The weather is often appalling. The nights are long and dark and seem designed expressly for the purpose of snuggling under a blanket on the sofa with the tree lights twinkling, a glass of something tempting within easy reach and a great big pile of delicious-smelling, beautiful new books. Here are some of my poetic festive favourites – all would make great gifts, too.

Carol Ann Duffy’s Frost Fair is completely wonderful, and makes me hanker after a re-read of Woolf’s Orlando. It’s so beautifully illustrated by David De Las Heras, it would make a lovely stocking filler.

Never has the exhilaration of whirling about on ice-skates been better captured than by Wordsworth, in a breathless and beautiful section of ‘The Prelude’ which I included in my second anthology, Tyger Tyger Burning Bright. I speak as a clumsy person, whose few attempts at skating have resulted in the kind of falls that elicit audible gasps from witnesses and some truly spectacular bruising. If Wordsworth can fill me with the desire to sail across frozen lakes under a wide wintry night sky, he can inspire anyone.

‘The Journey of the Magi’ by T S Eliot has an eerie, cold magic to it, perfect for reading and chewing over on a bitter winter’s night.

I love Betjeman’s ‘Christmas’ - hear the man himself read it here, with its evocation of the pull of family even more poignant this oddest of years (‘And girls in slacks remember Dad, / And oafish louts remember Mum’) and the seasonal cheer infecting everyone everywhere – from ‘provincial public houses’ to ‘many-steepled London’. I want to be in that country pub and on those glittering city streets for Christmas 2021.

Thomas Hardy’s gorgeous ‘The Fallow Deer at the Empty House’ is a favourite.

And Hardy’s ‘The Oxen’ perfectly captures how some scrap of childhood magic can cling to Christmas Eve and the vision of the nativity no matter what age and how agnostic I am.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

A contemporary poem I love is one for the festive refuseniks: ‘Bah… Humbug’ by Gregory Woods. This year, there will be lots of people perhaps missing the jolly chaos of a family Christmas, but this poems is a hymn to the allure of a solitary, batteries-not-included celebration with ‘books to the left of you, / gin to the right’. This poem was included in Christmas Crackers, one of Candlestick Press’s lovely pamphlets designed to be sent instead of a greetings card – perfect if you’d like to say something more substantial than ‘Season’s greetings’.

I bought a beautiful edition of ‘The Night Before Christmas’ a few years ago with Niroot Puttapipat’s beautiful silhouette illustrations and am frankly delighted that the kids insist on hearing it all year round. Due to our – frequently unseasonal – repeated readings, I am now word perfect. This confers an additional advantage: I can name all the reindeer (and, no, Rudolf doesn’t feature) and am therefore a splendid addition to any Christmas pub quiz team. Moore was a slightly unlikely Christmas poet, being an academic whose other works were heavy tomes on Hebrew. Legend has it that he composed this, his only famous poem, to entertain his children during a sleigh ride through Greenwich Village on Christmas Eve 1822, basing jolly St Nicholas on their coachman. I hope it’s true.

Also for children (though not only for children), I recommend the excellent selection of Christmas Poems edited by Gaby Morgan (who I’m lucky enough to have as editor for my Macmillan anthologies) and illustrated by Axel Scheffler of Gruffalo fame. And The Night Before Christmas in Wonderland by Carys Bexington, beautifully illustrated by Kate Hindley, was a new favourite last year with great verse, glorious pictures and clever homages to both beloved texts.

It’s not poetry, but I have to mention A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, which I try and read every year. And this year I have put Carol Ann Duffy’s new collection of Christmas poems on my wishlist.

Whatever you do at Christmas and wherever you are, I wish you happy reading. May your stocking be full of books and your cheeseboard always groaning.

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On 'Strange Meeting'

When I was fifteen, I had words on my wall. Between the pictures of Kurt Cobain, Withnail and Bagpuss I taped up my favourite poems: Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. (I would have felt it necessary to defend Bob’s inclusion at the time, but a Nobel Prize for Literature is a good passport to the pantheon of poets in anyone’s book.) ‘Fern Hill’ is all beauty, a hymn of pleasure tinged with the delicious ache of a nostalgia I was too young to really understand. ‘Mr Tambourine Man’’s lines about dancing beneath the diamond sky chimed with all the yearning for hedonistic beach parties a landlocked British teenager could muster (a lot). But why Wilfred?

I studied the First World War in class, like generations of school children since that cataclysm. We traced the underlying causes – the webs of European alliances, the scramble for arms, the rallying drumbeat of nationalism – and the fate of Franz Ferdinand. We learnt about the battles, the tactics and the casualties. But it wasn’t until we began to read war poetry that the terrors endured by the men - boys, really, most of them – came alive for me.

The Great War encouraged thousands to put pen to paper, producing plays and novels as well as poetry. Ordinary people turned to writing to process their experiences, and a generation of ‘trench poets’ sprang up almost overnight. In 1916 a canny London publisher printed an anthology called Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men – with a portable lightweight edition for the boys at the Front – and a second volume followed in 1918. Rupert Brooke’s patriotic war poetry and tragic death – from a mosquito bite, rather than in action – set the tone and his 1914 and Other Poems became a runaway bestseller. The disenchanted work of poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Owen found few fans at the time.

After the Armistice in November 1918 most of the war poets stopped writing – nobody mention the war – and only Brooke continued to sell in any numbers, bringing comfort to a grieving nation. However, at the end of the 1920s controversial memoirs of life in the trenches including Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front began to appear. These books ate away at any remaining illusions about the conflict. The writers whose patriotism turned to horrified disgust in the face of that war’s horrors are the ones whose words touch us most deeply now.

‘Strange Meeting’ is a work of hallucinatory horror. The epic language – vain citadels, blood-clogged chariot wheels, the swiftness of the tigress – evokes the colossal scale of the tragedy. Owen forces the reader to contemplate the squandered value of every one of the millions of lives lost, on both sides. Owen met Sassoon while recovering from shell shock in Scotland – ‘Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were’. Both men longed to close the vast gap of understanding between the troops at the Front and those left behind in Blighty, and ‘Strange Meeting’ is part of that quest. It is an enormous poem, straining with emotion, but written with extraordinary control. The unsettling half-rhymes (swiftness/tigress) and pararhymes (hall/Hell; groined/groaned) are designed to disturb. The time was out of joint; easy rhyme and gentle rhythm would be a betrayal of Owen’s message. The poem is a howl – though it isn’t without beauty: ‘hunting wild’ was a phrase I liked so much, I remember doodling it on my exercise books.

Wilfred Owen

There are other poems by Owen that are perhaps better known – ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ among them – but this was the one that had spoken so clearly to me I have never forgotten it. The experience of a sheltered suburban schoolgirl was light years away from the troops mired in mud on the Western Front but, like all great poetry, it seemed to take me there. Poetry is personal. It has been a privilege and a joy to edit volumes of it, and I can heartily recommend compiling your own anthology of favourites – physically and, if you can, in memory.

Reading brings so many rewards. It can parachute us into other lives, and whisk us off to exotic – or even imaginary – places. It can arouse powerful emotions and readers develop empathy through experiencing, second-hand, what the writer has endured or enjoyed. Poetry, with its inventive use of language, feels even more intimate than prose. Committing poems to heart helps us to absorb this nourishment even more fully, as we add the poet’s words to our mental furniture. In a world in which there is still so much war, ‘Strange Meeting’ is as essential to the canon as it was a hundred years ago.

Poems To Mend a Broken Heart

So: to the marriage of true minds, impediments were admitted. Love was not love, and altered. Someone stopped counting the ways in which they loved. Love was once like a red, red rose – and now there’s been a freak heatwave, and everything has wilted. Fear not! Nobody knows heartache like poets. Here are words from wise women to soothe the pain of love lost.

 If it was an unrequited infatuation:

Remember that we all weave ourselves fantasies every day, and forgive yourself. The most mundane of commutes can be enlivened by falling in love twelve times on the way, with the sweep of someone’s hair or the kind crinkles round their eyes. Idle daydreams make the world a little lighter. Read Carol Ann Duffy’s joyful ‘Dear Norman’ – about how she recasts the newspaper boy as an intrepid pearl diver – and remember not to take your own invented love stories too seriously.

If you thought they were something they weren’t:

Seek out Edith Nesbit’s ‘Among His Books’ (yes, she of Five Children and It and The Railway Children fame). She knew about complicated affairs, since she had a tempestuous personal life with her husband Hubert Bland. They both had affairs and Hubert had children with other women, some of which Edith brought up as her own. This one’s also a great poem for jilted bookworms as the narrator takes comfort in his books,

‘For these alone, of all dear things in life

            Have I found true.’ 

Edith Nesbit

If they thought you were something you weren’t:

Find solidarity in the words of two of the women associated with the racy Victorian Pre-Raphaelite artists – Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal. Christina was the sister of painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth was his model and muse and, later, his rather neglected wife. Despite producing hundreds of pictures of Elizabeth, Dante Gabriel frequently found his head turned by other inspirational women. Both poets wrote scathing verses about how he obsessively idealised Elizabeth while ignoring her actual talents and desires. In Christina’s ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, the hundreds of images he created of Elizabeth show her ‘Not as she is, but as she fills his dream’.

Elizabeth’s own poem ‘The Lust of the Eyes’ is a clear-eyed condemnation of her husband’s worthless worship.

If they were unfaithful:

There is a wealth of wonderful poetry by women on this subject - if you’ve been cheated on, take heart in the fact that many of the world’s wittiest women have endured the same fate. ‘Dead Love’ by poor old Elizabeth Siddal is another indictment on Dante Gabriel’s wicked ways.

Elizabeth Siddal, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

If you’re star-crossed:

Victorian poet Alice Maynell campaigned for an end to slavery and cruelty to animals, among other causes, had eight children, and still found time to write journalism and poetry. But evidently she knew the pain of love that must be denied. Her poem ‘Renouncement’ is both beautiful and heart-breaking and there’s comfort in knowing you’re not the first couple that – for whatever reason – can’t be together.

Renouncement

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the thought that lurks in all delight—

The thought of thee—and in the blue heaven’s height,
And in the sweetest passage of a song.
Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng

This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright;
But it must never, never come in sight;
I must stop short of thee the whole day long.
But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,

When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away,—

With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

If you were dumped:

The first professional woman writer, Aphra Behn, had clearly been the victim of a savage dumping in her time – see her poem ‘Love Armed’:

            ‘Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,

            Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed’.

It seems there were plenty of faithless lovers around in Victorian times, too, to judge from poems like Mary Webb’s wonderful ‘Why?’ which has a frankly agonising second and final verse – this is one for the wallowing days.

It’s just over, ok?

And of course Dorothy Parker has something spikily brilliant to say about it. She always does. Two-Volume Novel is short enough to fit on the bathroom mirror, as is Yrsa Daley-Ward’s beautiful and blistering Heat. For something longer to wallow in, there are few better evocations of the dreariness and exhaustion of heartbreak than Hera Lindsay Bird’s ‘Watching six seasons of the Nanny while my long-term relationship slowly fell apart’ – find it in her excellent collection Pamper Me to Hell & Back.

Moving On

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop is gently heartbreaking but it does imagine acceptance. Nikita Gill’s gorgeous ‘Venus’ – hear her read it here – is one to learn by heart. The last word, though, has to go to Sara Teasdale.

‘Let it Be Forgotten’

            Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,

            Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,

            Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,

            Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

            If anyone asks, say it was forgotten

            Long and long ago

            As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall

            In a long forgotten snow.

Most of these poems appear in She is Fierce, now out in an unmissably orange paperback edition.

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Five Forgotten Women Writers to Discover

In 2018, She is Fierce – an anthology of poems by women from the ancient world to the present day – was published. I had edited it to fill a gap on my own bookshelf because I couldn’t find an accessible volume that gathered diverse women’s voices from across the centuries. We were delighted when it found an appreciative audience and I was thrilled when my editor suggested there was room for more.

I suggested a theme of wanderlust, escape and freedom (and, ironically, finished the book during lockdown.) I’ve always found poetry an escape hatch from the everyday, and I had noticed that women seemed especially drawn to these themes. This was perhaps because in many periods and places their lives had been so constrained – from eighteenth century Bluestockings being reviled by critics for discussing literature to Victorian ladies cloistered in the home and their corsets, unable to step outside without chaperones. As well as including today’s brightest talents, in editing She Will Soar - now out in a stunning neon green paperback - I met a remarkable cast of writers from the past, many of whom were unfamiliar to me because they had been overlooked during their lifetimes or largely forgotten since. It’s been an education and a pleasure to discover their stories and include their biographies as well as their poems in the book, and here are a few of them I feel should be more widely known and read.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802 – 1838)

Letitia was better known as L.E.L., the enigmatic initials under which she published poetry in The Gentleman’s Magazine. They were eagerly awaited by readers, and writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti composed poems in her praise. Her much older editor fathered secret love children with her (she was forced to give them up), and since this was an open secret in Fleet Street, her bitter, almost exclusively male journalistic competitors saw to it that she was beset by rumours. Eventually Letitia married George Maclean and sailed with him to Ghana – then the Gold Coast – where he was governor. There she died of an overdose of Prussic Acid which was judged to have been accidental, despite some speculations to the contrary. L.E.L.’s romantic style fell out of fashion after her death, though her work has been rediscovered in recent decades. Lucasta Miller’s biography L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon comes highly recommended and I have a copy I’m looking forward to reading.

Anne Spencer (1882 - 1975)

Anne was a poet, teacher, librarian and civil rights activist and a key member of the Harlem Renaissance explosion of African-American culture. She was raised by her mother after her parents’ separation and, although she didn’t attend school until the age of eleven, she excelled in her education. Anne’s poetry addressed issues of racial and sexual inequality as well as expressing her deep love of nature, and her work was widely anthologised. She and her husband were active participants in the fight for civil rights and hosted figures including Martin Luther King Jr and Langston Hughes at their home in Lynchburg, now a museum.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907)

Mary was the great-great-niece of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but was better known during her life for her eerie, imaginative novels. She was too shy to publish her poetry under the famous family name, so she did so under the pseudonym ‘Anodos’. Her poetry only reached a wide audience after her death when another poet, Henry Newbolt, published them under her real name. Mary never married and devoted most of her time to lecturing at the Working Women’s College in London.

Gabriela Mistral (1889 – 1957)

Born in a remote village in the Chilean Andes, Gabriela was determined to qualify as a teacher despite being barred from studying because of her political journalism. On succeeding, she taught all around Chile and, later, organised educational programmes in Mexico. Travelling widely, Gabriela spent her life writing and acting in defence of the downtrodden. She worked for the League of Nations in Paris and as a diplomat, always opposing fascism, in Spain and Italy during the turbulent 1930s. In 1945 she was the first Spanish American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although she is a central figure in Latin American poetry, her work was new to me.

Sarah Egerton (1668 – 1723)

As a teenager, Sarah published ‘The Female Advocate’ (1686), a stinging riposte to ‘Love Given O’er’ (1682) by Robert Gould which attacked the ‘pride, lust and inconstancy’ of women. Her horrified father banished her from London for this transgression, packing her off to relatives in the country. She was widowed young, and her second marriage – to a second cousin twenty years her senior, rather than Henry Pierce to whom many of her poems are dedicated – was scandalously stormy. The author Delariviere Manley attacked Sarah’s looks, called her a ‘She-Devil incarnate’ and claimed ‘she’s in love with all the handsome Fellows she sees’ – though it’s worth noting that he was far from unbiased since they had quarrelled viciously. Despite furious legal battles Sarah and her unhappy husband were not granted a divorce. Her work often raged passionately against women being denied freedom and education.

She Will Soar: Bright, Brave Poems of Freedom by Women is published by Macmillan.

Hot reads for summer days

I LOVE hot weather. You’ll find me basking like a lizard at any opportunity I get, ideally with a gin and tonic and a book. This fantasy scenario happens a lot less frequently than I’d like, but in the event that you manage to secure yourself some summer reading time, here are some of my favourite hot weather reads.

The Tyranny of Lost Things

I really enjoyed this book by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett set during a sultry London summer. It’s brilliantly atmospheric - she absolutely nails the sticky restlessness of a city summer in your twenties. Zadie Smith’s NW is also excellent at bringing summer in London to life.

Under the Volcano

Malcolm Lowry’s bonkers masterpiece is a surreal book about the final days of an alcoholic diplomat in Mexico and much more entertaining than that sounds. It’s stifling and mythic and many layered - I know, because I was fool enough to write my Masters dissertation on it. There’s a brilliant Backlisted podcast about it featuring poet Ian McMillan that is well worth listening to if you’re already a fan. One for a sweltering afternoon, perhaps with a glass of mezcal - though, given the infernal effects on Firmin, I’d stop at one.

Cape May

I gobbled up Chip Cheek’s Cape May, which is comprised of a dash of Gatsby-flavoured glamour, a seasoning of sun and sea, a slosh of gin, a squeeze of sex, and a twist of sadness. Crisply written and completely transporting, it’s begging for an elegant veranda with a sea view on which to enjoy it, with a short dress and a long drink.

Ace of Bass

The opening poem in Fiona Benson’s absolutely excellent Vertigo & Ghost is the frenetically sticky ‘Ace of Bass’ (certainly the sound of a few of my formative summers). Hear Fiona read it here, and wonder whether anyone - even actual Ace of Bass - has ever captured the hormone-addled frenzy of schoolgirls in summer better.

The Girls

Emma Cline’s scorching debut is a dark pleasure for a hot night. She evokes a gritty, strip-lit 60s with the nostalgic haze torn away. The Girls is scarily perceptive on girlhood, especially the need to belong and the dark places this can lead to.

Let’s hope we have a few more scorching days and warm evenings ahead of us. I’d love to know your top heatwave reads, and I might revisit this subject again as I have a few other sizzling suggestions that didn’t make this list.

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I have been talking about poetry again...

Despite being stuck at home, my appetite for talking about poetry (or just talking to adults, full stop) is undimmed, so I’ve had to get my fix online! If you’re in the market for some poetry discussion, I talked to the wonderful Kate Halabura of Wandsworth Town Library. We had planned an event at the library in March but it was not to be, so it was lovely to chat with Kate via Zoom instead about She is Fierce and the hidden history of women’s poetry. You can see our chat below.

I also had the enormous pleasure of interviewing William Sieghart, author of the glorious Poetry Pharmacy books, for the Chiddingstone Literary Festival podcast. William is a poetry legend, and his books dispense thoughtful, perceptive advice on the perfect piece of poetry for whatever ails you - be it grief, loneliness or just not having enough pep for a party. You can listen to our conversation on the Chiddingstone Literary Festival website here. I’d love to interview more authors and poets so if you are looking for an event chair (online for the forseeable future, I guess) do get in touch.

I’ve long been convinced that poetry is good for you (here’s me harping on about it some years ago in the Daily Express) and it’s an approach also taken by the marvellous Deborah Alma. As well as being an incredibly talented poet, Deb is the Emergency Poet, touring the country in a vintage ambulance with Nurse Verse, dispensing poems to ease your problems. Her anthologies The Emergency Poet and The Everyday Poet are two of my favourites, and she now runs a real life Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire. I hope to visit in *the time after* but, for now, you can order from them online and even book an email or telephone consultation.

Please note that this website contains affiliate links and I may earn a small commission (at no cost to you) when you buy through these links.

Poetry recommendations for a pandemic

As the pandemic began to unfurl around us, I stopped reading. I found myself frozen, except for my scrolling thumb. I know I wasn’t the only one. The children were home, charging around stickily with a maelstrom of toys strewn in their wake, always hungry. There was still work to do: my own from the boisterous house and my husband’s, troublingly, still onsite in London. It wasn’t only lack of time that was preventing me escaping into a novel, though. For all the people declaring that Lockdown was the perfect time to tackle War and Peace at last, there were many who, like me, couldn’t focus their skittering attention enough to make it to the end of the paragraph.

Poetry came to my rescue because it was nourishment that could be quickly snapped up while stirring a soon-to-be forcefully rejected lunch or running a bath. It was a swift ejector seat from the panic of the present to somewhere - at this point, anywhere - else.

Everything is uncertain and unsettling. The least terrifying track I’ve found through the weeks of Lockdown is to focus, myopically, on today. Count the wins, savour the coffees, forgive yourself the frayed tempers, stop counting the crisps, and don’t raise your eyes to cast a speculative glance into next week. Here are some of the poems I’ve found comforting.

For the evenings during which you are despairing at the day just passed:

‘New Every Morning’ by Susan Coolidge

Every day is a fresh beginning,

Listen my soul to the glad refrain.

And, spite of old sorrows

And older sinning,

Troubles forecasted

And possible pain,

Take heart with the day and begin again.

To remind us that our imaginations cannot be locked down:

‘Imagination’ by Phillis Wheatley [extract]

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?

Soaring through air to find the bright abode,

Th’ empyreal place of thund’ring God,

We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,

And leave the rolling universe behind:

From star to star the mental optics rove,

Measure the skies, and range the realms above.

There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,

Or with new worlds amaze th’ unbounded soul.

From one recluse to the hearts of millions more:

‘Hope Is the Thing With Feathers’ by Emily Dickinson, beautifully illustrated by Chris Riddell

To remind us that that, too, shall pass:

‘Sea Love’ by Charlotte Mew

Tide be runnin’ the great world over

‘Twas only last June month I mind that we

Was thinkin’ the toss and the call in the breast of the lover

So everylastin’ as the sea.

Heer’s the same little fishes that sputter and swim,

Wi’ the moon’s old glim on the grey, wet sand;

An’ him no more to me nor me to him

Than the wind goin’ over my hand.

As a useful antidote to tedious Boy’s Own war rhetoric:

‘Love Among the Ruins of London’ by Muriel Grainger

In the desolated alleys near Saint Paul’s

Dust still falls,

And by Paternoster Row, the bookman’s haunt,

Ruins gaunt

Stand uncovered, as though mourning Fleet Street’s pride—

Lost Saint Bride.

But in city wastes are churches once concealed,

Now revealed—

All the squalid blocks that hid their ancient stone

Overthrown—

And the quiet benediction of a sunset fires

Wounded spires.

Pricking up between the paving, shoots of green

Now are seen;

In a sheltered niche a bird finds spartan rest

For her nest—

There is love among the ruins; after strife

There is life.

The most gently moving, eloquent promise I can imagine making to myself:

‘Lochan’ by Kathleen Jamie. Listen to Kathleen reading this beautiful poem here.