Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry

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Caroline Bird, Malika Booker, Mary Jean Chen, Tishani Doshi, Will Harris, Stephen Sexton, Danez Smith, Kae Tempest and more Re read ‘To My Nine-Year-Old Self’ by Helen Dunmore and ‘From the Journal of a Disappointed Man’ by Andrew Motion. Compare the ways in which both poets portray personal experiences. Use these questions to practice your essential essay writing skills, and consolidate your understanding of individual prescribed poems. The list of poems set for study appears below. Follow the links for discussion of individual poems. The semantic field of the body is notable throughout the poem, with examples typically drawn from two sources. The first is the physical descriptions of the girl and her friend, with a focus on describing different parts of her and what she is wearing. The second main source is through descriptions of their surrounding environment, such as the “warm flank of the house” and “eye of the street”. The humanising descriptions of these surroundings are interesting because they encourage the idea of onlookers to the scene, further increasing the sense of importance of these actions.

patterns of imagery - light/natural/pastoral imagery? images of joy? of danger? - why do they repeat this imagery - how does this reinforce/reflect the poet’s message Let me tell you about “Romantic Comedies,” perhaps my all-time favorite contemporary poem, which consists of premises for romantic comedies: “She likes things one way and he likes them the other” and “She’s a pale-skinned aesthete who edits a webzine, and he’s a suntanned meathead completely perplexed by the masthead” and “He calls Nashville, laughingly, Nashvegas, but she calls Nashville, icily, Nashville.” Besides being funny, this collection also believes deeply in connection, in—yes—love. Besides being funny, this collection also believes deeply in connection, in—yes—love. “I still love the river, I told her,” Leidner writes in “The River.” “But I do not love it because it is deep, and fast, and drowns many people. I love it because it runs behind my house, and I have lived above it forever.” – Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor I will say that this list was the hardest we’ve done so far—poetry is extremely subjective, and true consensus was rare (except for Claudia Rankine, for whom almost everyone in the office voted). And NB that for this one, we excluded huge “collected poems” for range. So please feel extra free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.CD Wright could be on this list for any number of books she wrote in the last decade—which is saying a lot, considering she died far too early, in 2016. Even her posthumous meditation on the beech tree, Casting Deep Shade, could probably survive aggressive cross-genre shoehorning from lyric nonfiction to poetry.* So with that sort of inter-disciplinary invention in mind, I offer you Wright’s 2011 National Book Award finalist, One With Others, a book-length poem that could also be described as… lyric documentary?

These poems were previously prescribed by Edexcel, and as such we have commentary and analysis available. There is also the use of possessive language, such as “his” or even further objectification through the likening to objects, such as “his jacuzzi”. This would help to make the descriptions much more emotive for a reader who would recognise the strong objectification and mistreatment, therefore developing much more sympathy for the narrator. This in turn creates a strange mix of emotions by the end of the poem with the murder of the feeder, with readers potentially feeling happy that the woman has been freed but conflicted over the means of this escape. MAIN BODY: disagree - the poets come to a point of disagreement in their portrayals of how - in poem A, - on the other hand, poet B adopts a more - yet the reader becomes increasingly aware The adjective “sharp” is a distinctive choice which has connotations of precision and accuracy, but also of potential pain and suffering, perhaps highlighting the potential impacts of these transitions and passages. In addition, the idea of the stairwell and stairs could be interpreted as both a physical and mental transition of childhood to adolescence and adulthood.The very rigid form of the poem helps to represent the strict regime imposed by the feeder, and how it has become commonplace. There are a total of ten tercet stanzas, which adds to the overall regimented mood. In addition, there is assonance between the final words on the first and third lines of each stanza, such as “cake” and “weight”, with an alternative form of assonance in each line which breaks from the traditional idea of using rhyme. This is a very interesting rhyme scheme for a reader because it enables variety of language while still maintaining a sense of conformity and expectations, potentially echoing the expectations of the feeder. structure - the title? - anaphora? - enjambement? - caesura? Medial caesura? - regular/irregular line length? - what does this emphasise or reflect? transfers between the narrator, the robot, and to a certain extent the narrator’s wife. The narrator Various poetic devices are used throughout ‘Eat Me’, one of the more common ones being alliteration. A key example is “bigger the better” and “broad belly wobble”, both of which help to reaffirm the idea of obesity and being overweight, and even have a ‘wobbly’ nature to the sound. This is further emphasised through the repetition of ‘fat’ throughout the poem, helping to ensure that this idea is never far from the reader’s thoughts, particularly in the seventh stanza. The forceful yet resentful tone of this stanza is particularly noticeable because of the way that the pace is increased.