Five poems to read with your morning coffee

The greatest casualty of our education system? Poetry. Either you’re from an older generation and you know a few lines by heart – whether or not you remember what they mean – or you’re younger, and were forced to kill and dissect some verses for your GCSEs. It’s enough to put anyone off.

But I think we still have a strong national curiosity about poetry. If only we could “get” it, we would like it. We all know that poetry’s important – we just don’t know how, or where, to begin.

Enter The Telegraph’s new poetry series. The idea is that we’ll publish a new poem each Monday, contemporary or old, which you can read in the time it takes to have a cup of tea.

I’ll give you a brief introduction, to explain who the poet is and what they might be doing. But don’t worry, exams are over. As the poet Caroline Bird once said at a reading: “Focus on the feeling first. Let it wash over you.” In other words: enjoy. LT

‘My Sadness is a Permeable Membrane’ by Alia Kobuszko

At 24, Alia Kobuszko must be one of the youngest poets ever published by Faber & Faber. It’s hard to summarise what her new collection, Dream Latitudes, is about, but her publishers are right to call the book “mysterious”. 

There are straightforward romances, recognisable grief; but it’s also threaded through with the recurring motif of a horse, which the narrator alternately rides and inhabits. In one poem, a boy is “bathed in the red kiss of traffic light”. In a more surreal sequence, a narrator lands in a “land of magnolias”, everything enveloped in a “fine layer of wax”. The horse, with “fields of windmills in its belly”, seems to represent what growing up feels like – you’re panicked and restless in a big world. 

Many of those images have stayed with me. But as with any “mysterious project”, I’d say that the collection is best read as a whole – so take this week’s poem as just a taste of Kobuszko’s voice. LT

‘Beholden, honey. Held…’ by John Berryman

There are 385 poems in John Berryman’s Dream Songs, one of the great books of 20th-century poetry. They follow an American everyman, Henry – not identical with his poet, but not entirely distinct – as he whirls through loves, losses, self-pity, booze and line after line of gorgeous thoughts.

Berryman lovers – and we are legion; his style is beautifully wild – have known for years of the existence of off-cuts. Now Shane McCrae, himself a leading American poet, has gathered them up in a new book, Only Sing. Below, we’ve excerpted one of the best.

To “what is it about”, I would say: psychological horror. Berryman drank too much, felt too much, thought too much. He was compulsive, repetitious, like the sounds in this poem: “shifts”, “still”, “ill”, “sins”, “sores”. To cast himself as a character was a way both to escape and draw near to himself. That unsettling proximity can be felt in the syntax, twisting and unfolding, keeping you off-balance, until it slams flat in one of the cold, short realisations: “His sins cover his sores.” CRC

‘Midnight Flowers’ by Eavan Boland

When Eavan Boland died in 2020, obituaries mostly celebrated her poems about the Irish famine. But perhaps the most political thing she did was write about women’s lives. Being a housewife in Dublin suburbia was the making of her – Boland’s best poems are about that particular solitude, empty houses; times when you stop performing for the world and it starts performing for you.

This week’s coffee-break poem is exemplary. A sleepless narrator comes down to gaze at her garden, and the sight of a snapdragon unearths a childhood memory. It’s a poem about wonder, but also fear: time passes, the narrator realises, as quickly as you can flick a light switch.

I find that last line so strange – a “jewel” cannot be “pliant”. But remember: the poem has already declared its love for paradox. LT

‘The Caged Skylark’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The final words of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “I am so happy. I am so happy.” This hadn’t always been obvious. Hopkins, who lived from 1844 to 1889, had been sickly and prone to depression. He’d struggled to balance his twin devotions, to his poetry and the Jesuit order. At one point, choosing the latter, he burned as many of his poems as he could. Typhoid killed him at 44.

The poems were posthumously published by Robert Bridges, who’d been sent the drafts by Hopkins and had squirrelled them away. They’re electric. No one wrote like Hopkins before; no one, I think, has since. He loved Old English, its alliterative chimes, and thrived on repetition, as the lines below – “bone-house, mean house”; “sweetest, sweetest”; “his own nest, wild nest” – show. Then there’s the famous “sprung rhythms”, marked by accents, giving the lines a giddiness.

“The Caged Skylark” is a Petrarchan sonnet: ABBAABBA for the octave, then CCDCCD for the sextet. The former part is fairly straightforward: our souls are bound by our bodies, just as a beautiful bird is stuck in its cage. Then comes the volta between octave and sextet – and the knottiness grows. For my money, Hopkins ends by suggesting that after the Resurrection, each soul will find itself free, still in a body (“flesh-bound”), but one perfected, one with the impossible lightness of the rainbow – that symbol of Christ. CRC

‘Postscript’ by Seamus Heaney

Sometimes the best poems are written quickly; sometimes you can tell. For Seamus Heaney, “Postscript”, about a drive along Galway Bay with friends Brian and Anne Friel, came “like a ball kicked in from nowhere”. “And yet,” he said in an interview, “publishing it in the The Irish Times was, as much as anything else, a way of sending a holiday postcard – a PS of sorts – to the Friels.”

I like the idea of a poem as a postcard, and it feels an astute way of recognising this poem’s form, in its blockiness, all the lines running to much the same length. It’s also a good description of the poem’s familiar tone – “And some time make the time to drive out west” – which, to me, sounds like the urging of a nostalgic, eccentric friend.

And yet: despite the poem’s speediness, it still manages – as I always remember a friend once saying – “to make me feel so calm”. LT