A new anthology, Poems That Make Grown Women Cry (Simon & Schuster UK, £9.99), has a double appeal, both for the range of poems (from Emily Dickinson to Yeats) and for the personal and critical insights offered by the 100 women (from Vanessa Redgrave to Annie Lennox) who chose them.
Below, Sharon Olds admires Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays and describes the points at which she begins to “choke up.”
Claire Bloom finds Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art hiding “a deep and enduring sorrow” under its ironic tone.
THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labour in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
~
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
~
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love’s austere and lonely offices?
ONE ART
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
~
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
~
Then practise losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
~
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
~
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
~
- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
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