Teachers Tips for Older Copies of Poetry Review
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Volume 100:3 Autumn 2010
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Tip Three
We have two poems about A.E. Housman’s “the land of lost content” in this issue. Matthew Hedley’s ‘Beetle’ is set in what is now Bosnia, and was then Yugoslavia, while Sarah Maguire’s ‘The Combustible Yalis of the Late Ottoman Empire’ is about Istanbul’s lost wooden mansions. Both poems are outsider views written by British visitors, and both encompass history as well as personal experience. In discussion, ask students to find the evidence of history in both poems, and to compare the ways mood is used to show what that history means as well as how the speaker of the poem feels. Ask students to write a piece of their own that looks back to a time and place before… something important happened.
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Volume 100:2 Summer 2010
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Tip One
Ruth Fainlight’ ‘Borrowed Time’ and Deryn Rees-Jones’s ‘After You Died’ are both poems about the death of a husband. In one he is dead, in the other not yet. Why are they both set at night, do you think? What does the moon represent to each poet? How much does the poem tell us about the narrator of each poem, and her life? Which feels more “real”, or more moving, and how does reading these poems make us feel – like a sympathiser, a voyeur, or a fellow human being? Does reading poems like these help us understand things about the world around us? Discuss with the students what it would be like to write about really difficult experiences.
Tip Two
Esther Morgan’s ‘What Happens While We Are Sleeping’ is a list poem which puts elements together to set a scene. Some details are aural and some visual, some are natural and some man-made, some huge and far-off, others tiny. Using the poem as a close model (a template), encourage the class to write scene-setting list poems of their own.
Tip Three
In ‘Slam!’ leading performance poets Lemn Sissay and Ben Mellor debate whether competition makes poetry more, or less accessible, and discuss the way performance poetry has been viewed as a specific cultural initiative. Open up a classroom discussion about the importance of performance. Does it make things “come alive”? Are students who are involved in performance poetry, rapping or even bands of their own? Is that poetry?
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Volume 100:1 Spring 2010
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Tip One
Use Maitreyabandhu’s ‘Homecoming” to explore form. Identify the tercets (three-line stanzas) and discuss the point of stepped lines. Do these alter the way you read the poem, to yourself or aloud? What’s the point of having the printed page record how the poem might sound? Use the poem as a template to write from.
Tip Two
Sheenagh Pugh’s elegiac ‘Trondheim: January’ is about Norway’s specific second world war history. Neil Rollinson – his war poems are ‘The Wall’ or “Head-shot’ – uses a more universal setting and detached tone. Discussion topics: What is authentic or appropriate? Which poem, if either, makes the students feel anti-war? In which ways do they themselves feel able to write about war?
Tip Three
This issue is full of biodiversity: John Kinsella’s anti-whaling poem, Sam Willetts’s ‘Starlings’, Lynn Foote’s heron, Sheenagh Pugh’s hooded crows, Kim Moore’s wolf and ‘Bees’ from David Briggs and Terry Jones. Pick two of these (according to class level) and discuss them in terms of paying attention to the creatures that are still here: the poem as a record or testimony. Ask students to write their own poems about creatures in light of this responsibility.
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