June Poems

Our topic this month was France and anything connected with it. This gave us plenty of scope and produced not only the usual wide range of poetry but confronted us with some problems of translation. Among the poems presented were ‘Last Post’ by Carol Ann Duffy, about WW1, ‘Maison d’Aujourd’Hiu’ by Donald Hall, stanzas from ‘The Grande Chartreuse’, by Matthew Arnold, 2 versions of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, 2 poems by Baudelaire ‘The Erotic Perfume’, and ‘The Albatross’ – this one caused problems because various translations are available, but not all of the same quality. The mood was lightened by a humorous poem called ‘Do a project’, and was changed again to perplexity by 2 short poems by the modern French poet Jacques Vert: ‘ For you my love’, which began like a traditional folk song or rhyme but developed to become rather dark and troubling* and ‘Breakfast’ which seemed inexplicably banal - which was probably the point! Our difficulty did not lie so much with the translations of the last 2 poems as with the style of these modern works. The fifteenth-century ‘Carol for Agincourt’ did not require much thought, but was gently entertaining. Our poems next month will be free choice.

* As in previous sessions, we notice a generational split at time as those of us who remember the original feminist struggle take a more rigorous and bleak view of some poems, while your younger female colleagues seem unperturbed by insights into the inequalities of gender and depictions of patriarchal oppression that some mid-20thC poets include in their works.