Monday, 28 November 2011

Rivers

I've been looking at poems about rivers in preparation for a forthcoming evening with Portsmouth Poetry Society.
Probably the first thing that came to mind was the Thames inter-textually referenced from Spenser in The Waste Land. Thinking of rivers rather than poets, I remembered the Severn being mentioned in Ivor Gurney a few times. I need to save Gertrude's speech in Hamlet, 'There is a willow grows aslant a brook', because it's just about my favourite bit of Shakespeare and there is an evening on him later in the programme. I think of Kleinzahler on the grey Passaic; Alice Oswald obviously on the Dart and Uncle Ted, too.
But what I'll talk about briefly and read will probably be Douglas Dunn's The River Through the City, cited by Prof. Sean O'Brien as a formative influence and, in fact, now looking more Sean than it does Dunn. And the last section of Andrew Motion's Fresh Water, a poem following the Thames from Lechlade to the Marchioness disaster which I've enthused about on here before.
But if anyone has other rivers in poetry they can suggest, my e-mail box is always open and I'd be glad to hear them.

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