X: Poems & Anti-Poems by Shane Rhodes

A review of Shane Rhodes\u27 X: Poems & Anti-Poems. This review focuses on the link between language and landscape, and considers the ways in which that link, reflected in Rhodes\u27 work, comments upon the use of language as an oppressive tool in the treatment of Native Americans and Canadians

'Under a shower of bird-notes': R. S. Thomas's elegiac poems for Elsi

It has been customary to see elegies by male poets as exceptional rather than typical poems. W. H. Auden wrote that ‘Poets seem to be more generally successful at writing elegies than at any other literary genre’. Peter Sacks reads Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ as a combination of a career move to secure immortality and a deliberate exploitation of ‘the pastoral elegy’s potential for theological criticism or political satire’. The poetry of R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) contains a body of love poems to his first wife Mildred (Elsi(e)) Eldridge (1909–91), which culminate in a number of elegiac poems published in Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995), and the posthumous Residues (2002) assembled by Thomas’s literary executor M. Wynn Thomas. Thomas’s elegiac poems for Elsi challenge critical assumptions about the exceptionality and separability of elegy outlined above. The relative informality of Thomas’s poems in terms of the subgenre’s conventions is, then, one interest of this article. My discussion will also focus briefly on Welsh aspects of the poems and how Thomas’s late poems for Elsi do not stand apart from his other poetry but are of a piece with it. It will also become apparent that many of Thomas’s poems are interested in commemorating a continuing shared subjectivity as opposed to describing a process of moving on from grief

earthquakes + tsunamis (a poetic diptych)

What follows is pair of found poems created by the practice of mining the writings of other authors to form a new work, a piece of language art. This process shares similarities with postmodern artistic practices including collage, appropriation, sampling, remixing, and repurposing. Source materials for found poems can include other poems, novels, newspaper articles, magazine stories, obituaries, letters—almost anything. For these particular poems, the source materials are academic educational research articles about geological fault zones and earthquakes. The majority of the text in these poems is taken ver- batim from their original articles and used in the order of appear- ance, with a few additions and alterations

Two Poems

Poetry by Carlyle MacPhai

Two Poems

Poetry by Dale Tracy