POETRY
ONE SECRET THING BY SHARON OLDS
(Cape Poetry £10)
In 2005, Laura Bush 招待するd Sharon Olds to the 国家の 調書をとる／予約する Festival in Washington DC.?
Olds 拒絶する／低下するd to …に出席する in an open letter published in The Nation, which 結論するd with these words: 'so many Americans who had felt pride in [their] country now feel anguish and shame, for the 現在の 政権 of 血, 負傷させるs and 解雇する／砲火／射撃. I thought of the clean linens at your （米）棚上げする／（英）提議する, the 向こうずねing knives and the 炎上s of the candles, and I could not stomach it'.
In its conflation of 全世界の 戦争 and 国内の 詳細（に述べる）, this is typical Olds.
Her work 調査するs the ways in which the overt horrors of political 暴力／激しさ are rooted in the covert horrors of the home, 特に the steely repression of her own 'hellfire Calvinist' しつけ.
In this new collection, however, she finds her once-bitter 態度 to her mother 軟化するing in the 直面する of her approaching death.
In Cassiopeia, one of the 調書をとる／予約する’s most moving poems, she 想像するs her as now 存在 '独房監禁,/a woman alone, out ahead/of everyone I know, scout of the mortal, heart/breaking into 単独の'.
Better Than God by Peter Porter (Picador Poetry £8.99)
One of our most 遂行するd and cerebral writers, Peter Porter once gave the matchless 鮮明度／定義 of poetry as 'an old art spreading rumours about/楽園'.?
Better Than God, published to 同時に起こる／一致する with his eightieth birthday, shows that he is in no danger of losing either his 知識人 and spiritual curiosity or his popular sensibility (he 展示（する）s a 徹底的な knowledge of 同時代の phraseology from 'download' to 'bling').
These 資格s are what enable him to pen what are perhaps the most 深く，強烈に civilised poems of our times, on 支配するs 範囲ing from 解放する／自由な-market greed to the CERN collider. A collection which will 返す countless readings.
RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM TRANSLATED BY EDWARD FITZGERALD (不死鳥／絶品 £5.99)
When it was first published in
1859, the same year as Darwin's Origin Of 種類, the Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam failed to sell a 選び出す／独身 copy.Several years later, one 設立する its way from the 取引 貯蔵所 into the 手渡すs of the visionary art critic John Ruskin - and it 速く became the most loved and 引用するd poem of the late Victorian age. ('Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night/Has flung the 石／投石する that puts the 星／主役にするs to Flight.')
Edward Fitzgerald's 解放する／自由な translation of the 1,000-year-old Persian text is essentially a long paean to death and change, one that 勧めるs us to 溺死する our petty cares in the 'ワイン' of joy and divine love.
Here's an attractive new 版 with a 非常に長い essay by Tony Briggs,
who characterises the poem, memorably, as 'the story of the apocalypse told to us by a 肉親，親類d uncle'.
A SHROPSHIRE LAD BY A.E. HOUSMAN, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY GARETH B THOMAS (Merlin Unwin £20)
Born in the month of the Rubaiyat's muted 解放（する）, Housman's literary career and 関心s seem to echo those of Fitzgerald.
Like him, his most celebrated work was 最初 解放（する）d to a resounding silence. But in the wake of the Boer War and, later, World War I, A Shropshire Lad's death-haunted melancholy 設立する itself wholly in tune with the nation's 決裂d psyche.
It is, if anything, a bleaker poem than Fitzgerald's, finding no 救済 in the tavern's sublime merriment, but only in the (n)艦隊／(a)素早いing solaces of the 'beautiful and death-struck year': a tree lit with white blossom, sunlight moving 速く over dark fiel ds.
This large-判型 版 features some evocative photographs of the Shropshire countryside, and a typically illuminating introduction by Professor Christopher Ricks.
CLASSIC FM FAVOURITE POEMS (Hodder £14.99)
In the manner now in vogue, Classic FM has 収集するd a 名簿（に載せる）／表（にあげる） of 'the nation's 100 favourite poems'.
と一緒に the usual 嫌疑者，容疑者／疑うs (Kipling, daffodils, Jenny Joseph), there are good things here, and it's nice to know that people are even thinking about poetry in this seedy 時代 of celebrity cellulite-spotting.
One might point out that almost all these poems can be 設立する in any decent collection of English poetry, of which most bookreading 世帯s have a copy.
Still, a popular anthology that gets people reading John Donne's The Good Morrow, Milton's deathless 'あられ／賞賛する, 宗教上の light' and T.S. Eliot's The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock can't be bad.
