Wednesday 1 December 2010

Poetry Island (2)

Five more gone today, costing us these nuggets: "the priest and the doctor / in their long coats / Running over the fields" (P.Larkin, "Days"), and "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose" (R.Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner").  The only unanimous castaway was Roethke's "Wish for a Young Wife" which begins "My lizard, my lively writher" (oops I thought it said "writer" there for a minute).  That leaves a couple of war poems, a couple of love poems, and "The Sick Rose".