I had a bit of a mental health wobble over the weekend in which I felt useless and unworthy. Thankfully this is old ground and over the years I have developed a few techniques to get myself past it. Techniques that don’t involve blocking it out by drinking myself silly or just ignoring it. These things will not be ignored so it’s best to address them as and when they come up or at least as soon as the spoons become available. Poetry is one of those devices. I try to tell myself my trauma in iambic pentameter or rhyme it out or somesuch. Certainly trying to re-structure how I phrase my feelings gifts me with a different angle to look at them from and can provide different paths I can take.
It’s every bit as important to read poetry as it is to read *about* poetry.
Death of a Naturalist tuned 60 on the first of January this year (2026).
I was introduced to this book in 1990 as part of my G.C.S.E in English Literature. The English teacher at this school (St. Columbas in Portaferry. I had recently parted company with The Red High because of Musical differences and I will not be taking questions on that matter) had promised anyone taking on English Lit that there would be no Shakespeare. Baffling. If you don’t like Shakespeare should you be doing English lit? Anyway, we did Sean O’Casey “Juno and the Paycock”, Jennifer Johnstone “How many miles to Babylon” and Seamus Heaney “Death of a Naturalist” all excellent and easily a match for The Bard but still. He’s The Bard.
I probably didn’t appreciate this as much as I could have at the time. I was 14 and had just been expelled from a Grammar school. I was pretty cynical about the whole education system because I felt entirely let down by it and as such had no interest in engaging with it. Privately I did fall in love with this volume.
I have a particular fondness for proletariat poetry, poetry written and spoken in a working class accent about working class things within a working class idiom. This is probably because of the huge chip I have on my shoulder about class. I’m working on it. Even more particularly in a colloquial accent or even my accent. With Heaney all of my senses are engaged and I recognise some of the places he speaks about. I can relate to “Personal Helicon” more so than I can with “The Divine Comedy” (I still love them both).
The 1947 Education act opened the doors to further and higher education in The North of Ireland and boy did it. suddenly working class Catholics and Nationalists had access to university. Out of this came the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and figures like John Hume, Eamonn McCann and Bernadette Devlin were upsetting the status quo and more importantly, were informed in a way they had never been before. These people and the associations they made are precisely why subsequent governments have bent over backwards to price working class people out of education. “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” Audre Lorde’
Now *THIS* is a love poem.
Twice Shy
Her scarf a la Bardot, In suede flats for the walk, She came with me one evening For air and friendly talk. We crossed the quiet river, Took the embankment walk.
Traffic holding its breath, Sky a tense diaphragm: Dusk hung like a backcloth That shook where a swan swam, Tremulous as a hawk Hanging deadly, calm.
A vacuum of need Collapsed each hunting heart But tremulously we held As hawk and prey apart, Preserved classic decorum, Deployed our talk with art.
Our Juvenilia Had taught us both to wait, Not to publish feeling And regret it all too late – Mushroom loves already Had puffed and burst in hate.
So, chary and excited, As a thrush linked on a hawk, We thrilled to the March twilight With nervous childish talk: Still waters running deep Along the embankment walk.
Every now and again I’m going to post about books that have been significant to me on this wee journey. I say wee journey, I’ve been noodling and doodling with poetry most of my life. Lately I’ve become a bit less insecure about showing it to anyone. I dunno. It’s not that I care less about what people think these days. I do care about what people think. Experience has taught me that no matter what anyone does there will be those that enjoy it and those who do not and that’s fine. I’m not here to please everyone. I’m not here to annoy anyone either but somehow I manage to do this without effort or intention.
The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry
This is probably the most important book about poetry that I have. It teaches Meter and form and gives wonderful examples and explanations. It’s been with me since it’s publication in 2005 and I have gone through it and it’s exercises many, many times. I still run through it and keep it nearby as reference book. I will never learn how to create a Sestina or a Villanelle without some form of ready reckoner.
And of course it’s Beloved Stephen Fry. Frequently referred to as an intellectual for the masses (occasionally this is pejorative) he is a performer, comedian, writer and wit that I do admire although he has said a few things over the years that I would be at variance with. If he had been my English teacher I imagine I’d have done a lot better than I did in my exams back in the late 20th century,
