8 thoughts on “From Bad To Verse”

  1. Liam Halligan

    That’s something Irish poets could try, writing actual poetry. We must have the most irrelevant contemporary poetry in the world. It’s jaded and written by phonies. Written by poets for other poets. No one reads it or buys it. Kavanagh shit better verse.

    1. Paulus

      Indeed:

      You could call it a literary crime.
      It features here time after time.
      But what gets up my nose
      from those so disposed
      Is that it rarely has rhythm or rhyme.

  3. V-19

    Ah lads, Liam, Scotts
    tis only a bitta graffitti ffs

    Time to lockdown Broadsheet mebbe

    The moaning and cribbing and infighting
    and turning on each other like rabid scavengers

    feck sake, that Alternatively thread dug some right beauties back up

    I dunno lads, this opening up a thread only to see what’s wrong with it is a tragic reminder of

    stuff

  4. sidhe

    Quarantine

    In the worst hour of the worst season
    of the worst year of a whole people
    a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
    He was walking-they were both walking-north.

    She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
    He lifted her and put her on his back.
    He walked like that west and north.
    Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

    In the morning they were both found dead.
    Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
    But her feet were held against his breastbone.
    The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

    Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
    There is no place here for the inexact
    praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
    There is only time for this merciless inventory:

    Their death together in the winter of 1847.
    Also what they suffered. How they lived.
    And what there is between a man and a woman.
    And in which darkness it can best be proved.

    RIP Eavan Boland

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