Forest could keep secrets Forest could keep secrets
Forest tune in every day to watersound and birdsound Forest letting her hair down to the teeming creeping of her forest-ground
But Forest don't broadcast her business no Forest cover her business down from sky and fast-eye sun and when night come and darkness wrap her like a gown Forest is a bad dream woman
Forest dreaming about mountain and when earth was young Forest dreaming of the caress of gold Forest roosting with mysterious eldorado and when howler monkey wake her up with howl Forest just stretch and stir to a new day of sound
but coming back to secrets Forest could keep secrets Forest could keep secrets And we must keep Forest
Lying on the sofa all curled and meek but in my furry-fuzzy head there's a rapping beat. Gonna rap while I'm napping and looking sweet gonna rap while I'm padding on the balls of my feet
Gonna rap on my head gonna rap on my tail gonna rap on my you know where. So wave your paws in the air like you just don't care with nine lives to spare gimme five right here.
Well, they say that we cats are killed by curiosity,
but does the moggie mind? No, I've got suavity. When I get to heaven gonna rap with Macavity, gonna find his hidden paw and clear up that mystery.
Nap it up scratch it up the knack is free fur it up purr it up yes that's me.
The meanest cat-rapper you'll ever see. Number one of the street-sound galaxy.
Grace Nichols is a poet whose work has been central to our understanding of the important cultural Caribbean-British connection for nearly 3 decades. From her first collection, I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1983), to her more recent work such as Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), she has uncovered with a disquieting lyricism and humour the various facets of life as a woman and as an immigrant living in the UK.
Nichols was born in Guyana in 1950, and moved to live in the UK in 1977. Her work is influenced by the history and culture of her homeland, in particular the oral story-telling tradition with its fantastic folk tales, the landscape and its rural tasks and the history of enslavement (particularly relating to women). ‘To My Coral Bones’ from Startling the Flying Fish (2006) explores the importance of Nichols’ Caribbean heritage, suggesting she has ‘alwayscarried deepthese islands’.
On arrival in the UK, Nichols’ work began to respond to the contemporary situation. She was one of a number of West-Indian poets, including Linton Kwesi-Johnson and John Agard, whose work also touched on racial tensions at a time when immigration was at the centre of the political debates under Margaret Thatcher’s government. Poems from her 1984 collection The Fat Black Woman’s Poems are an arresting and humourous riposte, presenting the unfettered thoughts of the heroine in the bath or at the shops. A later poem, ‘Hurricane Hits England’, expresses the connection between cultures, when a hurricane reminds her that ‘the earth is the earth is the earth’.
Her poetry is characterized not just by the themes above, but by an acute attention to the language which carries the poems. Her work marries the Creole of her homeland with standard English, creating new possibilities for rhythm and rhyme. As such, while reading her poetry on the page offers fascinating insights to the potential for linguistic hybridity, it is when spoken aloud that her techniques sing most powerfully.
In her reading for the Archive, Nichols’ voice brings the poems to life, giving free reign to the infectious lyrical sweep of her verse. For example, in ‘Praise Song for My Mother’ (which is on the current GCSE syllabus), there is a true harmony in the blend of the vibrant imagery, ‘the fish’s red gill’ and ‘the flame tree’s spread’, the haunting recollection of the past tense ‘You were’, and the forward movement of the repeated stanza structure and end-rhymes.
Her poetry for children is characterized by the same rhythms as her other poetry, although the subjects are designed to appeal to a younger audience. ‘Cat-Rap’, included here, proves that Nichols herself is ‘The meanest cat-rapper you’ll ever seeNumber one of the street-sound galaxy’.
It took a hurricane, to bring her closer To the landscape. Half the night she lay awake, The howling ship of the wind, Its gathering rage, Like some dark ancestral spectre. Fearful and reassuring.
Talk to me Huracan Talk to me Oya Talk to me Shango And Hattie, My sweeping, back-home cousin.
Tell me why you visit An English coast? What is the meaning Of old tongues Reaping havoc In new places?
The blinding illumination, Even as you short- Circuit us Into further darkness?
What is the meaning of trees Falling heavy as whales Their crusted roots Their cratered graves?
O why is my heart unchained?
Tropical Oya of the Weather, I am aligning myself to you, I am following the movement of your winds, I am riding the mystery of your storm.
Ah, sweet mystery, Come to break the frozen lake in me, Shaking the foundations of the very trees within me, Come to let me know That the earth is the earth is the earth.
If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever closed your legs to someone you loved opened them for someone you didn’t moved against a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach seaweed clinging to your ankles paid good money for a bad haircut backed away from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled into the back seat for lack of a tampon if you swam across a river under rain sang using a dildo for a microphone stayed up to watch the moon eat the sun entire ripped out the stitches in your heart because why not if you think nothing & no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange – The size of it made us all laugh. I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave – They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange, it made me so happy, As ordinary things often do Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park. This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy. I did all the jobs on my list And enjoyed them and had some time over. I love you. I’m glad I exist.
Whether or not you’re ill, it’s still fourteen days
quarantine. We’ve talked the whole thing through
on the phone. They’ll be in Marosszentkirály.
We’ll be in Marosvásárhely. Close contact is
forbidden. They stand just a little way off from us.
Grown-up children. No barrier between us,
No fence, no railing, no police. Nothing at all,
Beyond a sort of invisible awareness.
A realisation. Self-limitation.
We wave to them. No handshakes. No hugs.
No blokey clap on the back or rub of the shoulders.
Like once. Merely an entirely different
closeness. Which is also already a distance.
Unbridgeable. Unfathomable. As we
learn to keep our distance. When we step out of
ourselves, we cease to be. That’s what we’re thinking.
Or not even that, just about the discipline forced
Onto us. We point out where the car is.
They move off towards it. A practice exercise, perhaps,
for something we don’t yet recognise. The barrier hardest
to break down is the one that doesn’t exist.
Béla Markó, poet, writer, editor and politician, was born in Kézdivásárhely (Târgu Secuiesc, Romania) in 1951. He has published numerous volumes of poetry, collections of essays, children's books and Hungarian school textbooks. He has also translated Romanian poetry and drama. His poetry has been translated into French and Romanian. Poems by Markó have also appeared in English translation in anthologies and literary journals as well as in his own volume, Notes on a Happy Pear Tree (Pont Press, 1999, transl. Sylvia Csiffary).
Anna Bentley is a British translator of Hungarian literature. In 2019, her translation of Ervin Lázár's children's classic, Arnica the Duck Princess was published by Pushkin Children's Press and her translation of Anna Menyhért's study of five forgotten Hungarian women writers, Women's Literary Tradition and Twentieth-Century Hungarian Writers was published by Brill. Several stories by Gabi Csutak have recently appeared in Anna's translation in Trafika Europe's online journal. Her translations of contemporary poets such as Mónika Mesterházi and Zsófia Balla have appeared on Hungarian Literature Online.
‘That orange, it made me so happy’: 50 poems to boost your mood
Humour, beauty, solace ... the right poem can bring a ray of sunshine. Andrew Motion, Kayo Chingonyi, Tishani Doshi and other poets recommend the verses that lift their spirits
Brian Bilston, Kayo Chingonyi, Ella Risbridger, Andrew Motion, Hannah Lowe, Andrew McMillan, Elif Shafak, Rishi Dastidar, Tishani Doshi and Mary Jean Chan
Poetry refreshes the parts that other words cannot reach and, like the little bird of Emily Dickinson’s Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, contains the strength to sustain us even in the “chillest land / And on the strangest sea”. But a poem doesn’t have to be explicitly inspirational to do that. Frank O’Hara’s Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!] hoicks us up off the floor with its sheer exuberance and breathlessness: we have no choice but to be swept along. And what could be more helpful than a poem that pokes fun at how ridiculous we all are, as presented in UA Fanthorpe’s wickedly funny triptych Not My Best Side, giving voice to the characters in Paolo Uccello’s painting Saint George and the Dragon. Of course, laughter can provide the biggest pick-me-up of all, and there are few poets funnier than Billy Collins. In Aimless Love, through celebrating a wren, a dead mouse and a bar of soap, he helps us fall back in love with life. Finally, in terms of a strategy for coping with all that the world throws at us, who can better that offered by Roger McGough in his short poem Survivor?
I’m particularly moved by poets who sing from the rooftops, as in Donika Kelly’s wonderful poem – a tender though not sentimental pick-me-up for when you are so enamoured of someone that you find yourself playing slow jams in the early hours of the morning. The immediacy of desire also suffuses Amy Key’s Brand New Lover, with its woozy soft focus and tense interplay of disclosure and guardedness. When I find myself whingeing, the best medicine is Roddy Lumsden’s Against Complaint, which affirms that most stoic of maxims, “It could be worse”. There is, in so many things, a small crack through which hope can enter. Which brings to mind Fiona Benson’s gorgeous little poem Caveat (published below), which, read in the midst of tribulations, will surely gladden the heart like an empathetic hand on the shoulder. And when I need to remember happier times I look to From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee, a poem which swells with hard-won joy like a peach ripening on the branch
Ada Limón
Ella Risbridger
Editor of the anthology Set Me on Fire: A Poem for Every Feeling
What I like in a poem is jokes, and what I hate is a poem that takes itself too seriously. I love being spoken to directly by the poet, and I love a poem that makes me feel we’re getting to the secret heart of everything: in these five, that’s reached through rain on a window, “lady horses”, good money for a bad haircut and using a guinea pig as a telephone. Also, Jesus having a cup of coffee. I love a poem that knows happiness is tough, even if you “make it look easy”, like Ada Limon in How to Triumph Like a Girl (published below). I love Kim Addonizio for knowing that “joy is coming” (To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall, a real banger of a title). I love James Tate’s Goodtime Jesus for its perfect punchline: “Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody”. And I love Heather Christle’s People Are a Living Structure Like a Coral Reef, especially for her unabashed use of the exclamation mark. I love poems about connection. I love poems about people. I love poems about stuff. In the words of Joe Dunthorne’s Poem in Which I Practise Happiness, “I love the piano./ I love true crime./ I love the sun/ when it arrives/ like a tray/ of drinks.”
The idea that poems might be an easy means of cheering ourselves up is enough to make anyone feel depressed, especially if the poems themselves are determined to be cheerful. Remember Hardy: “If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst”. That might overstate the case a little, but he’s right about the relationship between (relative) optimism and realism. For this reason, four of my choices are poems that admit – with varying degrees of candour – what problems need to be overcome, in order for their speakers to find equilibrium of some kind. Boredom and isolation in the case of Alexander Pope’s affectionate Epistle to Miss Blount; grief in William Cowper’s apparently small-scale (but in fact expansive) Epitaph on a Hare; homesickness and the difficulties of home-making in Grace Nichols’s Hurricane Hits England; and racist hostility in Jackie Kay’s In My Country. In my fifth choice, Seamus Heaney’s Postscript (published below), an affirming flame is allowed to blaze more defiantly, but it’s still battered and blustered by the winds of the world.
Sharon Olds
Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi
Hannah Lowe Winner of the 2021 Costa book of the year for her collection The Kids
The poems that lift my spirits are those that find beauty in the domestic and everyday. Donny O’Rourke’s Great Western Road describes a Saturday well spent, a list of jubilant images that builds to a declaration: “God Glasgow it’s glorious / just to gulp you down in heartfuls”. Philip Levine’s Belle Isle, 1949 finds wonder in a teenage night swim in the Detroit River, “to baptise ourselves in the brine / of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles”. James Berry’s Beginning in a City, 1948 mixes public history with personal remembrance, telling of how the newly arrived Jamaican migrant survives his first night in England, ending with a headstrong optimism: “So I had begun. Begun in London.” Marie Howe’s beautiful elegy for her brother What the Living Do lifts my spirits by emphasising how the small things make a life and should be cherished, as does Sharon Olds’s Looking at Them Asleep. I love the surprise and precision of Olds’s use of metaphor to describe her children sleeping: “oh the son he is sideways in his bed / one knee up as if he is climbing / sharp stairs up into the night”.
Elizabeth Bishop
Andrew McMillan Photograph: undefined/Urszula Soltys
I’ve spent time recently searching for release from my own anxiety and co-editing an anthology, 100 Queer Poems. The twin missions of trying to reorient my mind and immerse myself in piles of poetry reminded me of the solace a good stanza or line might bring. Think of that great ending to Elizabeth Bishop’s Filling Station, “somebody loves us all”; it often comes back to me when I feel isolated or alone. The journey towards better loving ourselves is perhaps more important (and yes, I know RuPaul said that better). Ocean Vuong’s Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong (published below), with its invocation “Ocean, don’t be afraid”, is a poem I often return to, as is Langston Hughes’ wonderful Final Curve. Mina Loy’s “There is no life or death” says it’s OK to sit in the flux of things; it rejects absolutes, and its rhymes and syllables pull us forward into possibility. Ultimately, my mood is boosted by just being at home with my boyfriend and our dog; that reminds me of a Mark Strand poem that hugs you with the warmth of a shared duvet, Provisional Eternity. It’s the simplicity of “this”, “this never wanting it to end”; it reaches beyond sex, beyond lust, into a state of comfort and ease between two people. I used to have it pinned above my desk, but now it’s just on the noticeboard of my mind.
Poetry is deeply personal. You might struggle to explain to yourself, let alone to others, why you feel emotional when you read a certain poem; how it remains with you afterwards, like a childhood memory lodged in your heart. Poems can take you within, making you aware of parts of yourself you have neglected; and they can also lift you up and carry you near and far, connecting you with people and experiences beyond borders. When I was younger, for a long time I assumed that being an immigrant, I could not fully understand or enjoy English verse; there would always be something I would miss out – a broken piece, an invisible shard. That I came to adore reading poems in a language other than my mother tongue, I owe to many wonderful poets who challenged my fears and encouraged me to dive in. Today I see poets as a tribe of their own, impossible to narrow down to national boxes. Like Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes. First, I would love to recommend All Rivers at Once by the wonderful Rumi, whose voice is needed in today’s polarised world more than ever before. This poem for me is primarily about connectivity and compassion. I am a big fan of CP Cavafy, and I read his work time and again - especially Ithaka. Lemn Sissay’s voice is a balm for our troubled times; Remember How We Forgot is incredibly moving. Pádraig Ó Tuama’s [the] north[ern] [of] ireland contains so much pain, memory and resilience, it will deeply resonate with readers across the world. And then there is the inimitable Jackie Kay: I love the courage and wisdom in her Old Tongue.
“A fine distraction” tends to be what I want from a poem to cheer me up. My first stop is always Robert Herrick, and especially Delight in Disorder. I never fail to be charmed by the beguiling twinkle that runs through it. Also beguiling is the way Holly Singlehurst’s Hiroshima, 1961 frames the joy of playing with your shadow and being bathed by sunlight. John McCullough’s Soulcraft ruminates on light too, a “private neon”, crucial for lifting him when “a flock of days descends / and my soul flickers, goes to ground”. The poem rises from here, reminding us that something as simple as rain can revive our spirits again. And if not the weather, how about a piece of fruit? Wendy Cope’s delight in the mundane is always a tonic. The Orange (published below) is an exquisite example of this: who doesn’t love those rare days that are “quite easy / I did all the jobs on my list”? For me, though, the best mood boost is witnessing an underdog hero overcome formidable odds to triumph in nail-biting circumstances. So I hope Nael’s The Tiger, written when he was just six, has you punching the air in joy the way I do every time I read it.
Partly because I’ve recently spent time as a caregiver, and partly because legislation around the autonomy of women’s bodies continues to be so depressing, I looked for poems of the body, poems of desire, that could inject what Audre Lorde called the “lifeforce” into me. Let’s begin with Lorde’s Recreation, which believes a body can be made into a poem. I wanted to collect female voices and create a web of ancestry between them – so, the tenderness of Zeina Hashem Beck’s Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music contrasts with the bristle of Marina Tsvetaeva’s An Attempt at Jealousy. Then there’s the perseverance of Forough Farrokhzad, who brings us to the “love-filled threshold” in I Will Greet the Sun Again, and the sheer sexiness of Ella Frears’s Fucking in Cornwall - “Do you remember what it felt like to dig a hole all day/ with a tiny spade just to watch it fill with sea?/ I want it like that.”
Mary Oliver
Mary Jean Chan Winner of the 2019 Costa poetry prize for Fleche
Five poems come to mind that might offer solace during these troubled times. The first is Emily Berry’s Canopy, which she describes as an “anti-Rock-a-bye baby”: it’s about survival and connection, and I return to it over and over. I had the pleasure of rereading Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo’s work as a judge for this year’s Jhalak Prize. In their latest collection Like a Tree, Walking, If There Is an Afterwards stood out to me as a shimmering poem about loss and silence. My third poem is Poplar Street, by the American poet Chen Chen. It concludes his debut collection, and is one of the most hopeful poems I have ever read about self-acceptance, love and forgiveness. The final two poems I have found particularly moving in the wake of the pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver and When the War is Over by WS Merwin. Both are about what it means to live, which is a question always worth asking.
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