John Baker’s Blog

American poet, Gary Snyder was recently awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize - a $100,000 lifetime achievement award.
This is one of his poems:
For a Stone Girl at Sanchi
half asleep on the cold grass
night rain flicking the maples
under a black bowl upside-down
on a flat land
[...]

Poet Robert Peake muses on breaking through the barriers that keep a poem less than 40 lines in length:
The stand-up comedian Billy Connolly is a master at delivering humor through seemingly endless digressions. When he finally comes back to the main topic, long since forgotten in the audience’s mind, he earns not only laughs but [...]

Further In
On the main road into the city
when the sun is low.
The traffic thickens, crawls.
It is a sluggish dragon glittering.
I am one of the dragon’s scales.
Suddenly the red sun is
right in the middle of the windscreen
streaming in.
I am transparent
and writing becomes visible
inside me
words in invisible ink
which appear
when the paper is held to the fire!
I know [...]

Dick Jones offers us a poem and talks about the poet, David Harsent author of the collection, Legion.
I think of Akhmatova’s famous encounter with the starved woman in the queue outside a Russian jail during the terror. The woman recognised Akhmatova and said: “Can you describe this?” When Akhmatova said, “I can”, a ghost [...]