This feature will publish student poetry and prose with a small explanation so you can get a clearer understanding of what references are made and what the piece is trying to say. Alongside student poetry there will be a ‘Poem of Note’, a poem written by an established writer.
This week we look at two student poems and The Bright Field by RS Thomas.
Untitled Haiku – Peter Rylands
Coffee at my place.
No view through condensation,
No view anyway.
A Haiku is a Japanese poem, their original form obeying a 17 syllable, three-phrase sequence; a construction of 5 – 7 – 5. There are many rules and developments in the construction of a Haiku but this example uses just the syllable count before observing an intimate, but disappointing event in time, where the simple pleasure of a view is obscured before a realisation that there isn’t one in the first place.
Stag Do – Peter Rylands
Loud and lairy,
Fuck contrary.
We are British,
Maybe even English!
We’ll speak
Loud
And
Slow.
Because that’s all we know.
Again this poem is an observation with the subject being British stag parties abroad. The second line refers to the nursery rhyme ‘Mary Mary Quite Contrary’ but shatters that sensibility with the expletive. The ruin of something so simple as a nursery rhyme is a way of exploring the nature of a stag do and is enhanced by the persona’s misunderstanding of the word ‘contrary’. The form also takes on the speech of British abroad with the stereotypical ‘loud and slow in English’ as a communicative method which culminates in an unsympathetic view of the ignorant persona and group.
Poem of Note
The Bright Field – RS Thomas
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Poem sourced from here.
If you would like your poem to be placed in Poet’s Corner please submit to aeypmry@nottingham.ac.uk or arts@impactnottingham.com
Pictures sourced from Flickr via Ross Pollack
