Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born in Portland, Maine in 1807, was an enormously popular poet in his time, and, notwithstanding, a serious one. His translation and editing, as well as his popularity, were intellectual bridges linking America and Europe. He died in 1882 and modernism soon overtook what many would see as his essentially 19th-century poetics. His reputation now seems unequal to his achievement. The whole poem is designed as a unity, the syntax and verses flowing into one another like the interrelated ecologies they reflect. While it’s a didactic poem, with a central commitment to the variously “hard” environmental sciences, Down Here You’re With the Possible is also “down here” with the human need for poetry. It sustains our visual pleasure; it has the verbal music and texture that irresistibly appeal to “the blind inner life”.

Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build Then we’re lifted into a Romantic register again, with “cloudy fancies” and “divine expression.” This initial comparison is vague because it’s difficult to attribute meaning to the phrase “divine expression”. It’s a somewhat Wordsworthian idea: nature as a source of “intimations of immortality” perhaps. The implication could include prayer itself. Longfellow’s next comparison, the “white countenance” as the “confession” of “the troubled heart” is contrastingly specific: the effect is powerful. It carries us to the nub of the verse, the word “grief” in the last line. The emotion is attributed to the sky, of course, but by now the sympathetic reader might suspect something more is going on. Lines Off, the 2019 collection by Hugo Williams, explores among a variety of themes the poet’s experiences of kidney disease and dialysis, followed by a successful kidney transplant in 2014. “Lines off” is a stage direction, indicating when an actor’s words are to be spoken off-stage or off-camera. It’s a title that gestures towards the writer’s theatrical family connections, a rich autobiographical source he has often mined in poetry, but in the present context, it also symbolises the reverse of such intimacy. Illness seems to sideline the sufferer from the real “action” of their own existence. As patients we seem to become less visible to others and to ourselves.Satyamurti’s “room of last resort”, a passage leading to one of London’s tube stations is a familiar literary underground, too. The scene of escape that opens Wilfred Owen’s Strange Meeting, where the dead have exchanged unbearable battlefield chaos for futureless stasis might be an appropriate dimension. The poem continually evokes a kind of suspended animation in the rough sleepers, reflecting their tenuous and seemingly superfluous existence in terms like “strung out” and “stunned” (which could also suggest drug or alcohol addiction) and in the stanza-crossing enjambment in the first 15 lines. Satyamurti takes a long look at the passivity to which homeless people have been reduced; they are seen in a long view, over time, and have blurred into a near-collective identity. Although some may be only temporary “residents” (“you pass four, sometimes more”) they are intentionally reduced to types.

The above poem was the second of fourteen by Tagore in the June 1913 issue of Poetry magazine. Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature, "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West". Horses connect the camper to the stars again: now he joins forces with the “star-herds” leaving “hoof-marks” over the open ground of the sky. The challenge to the landowner (“your estate”) is gently made, a slant-wise reminder why the poem was written and an assertion of the value of the unowned. I first discovered the poetry of the 14th-century Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym when, planning a poem about my roof-nesting herring-gull family, I cast around the internet for company and ideas. I was thrilled by the radiance of the poem I discovered, Yr Wylan: Gwilym’s seagull soars, alive and shining, even in English translation.Again, Gwilym avoids the self-centred lyric rhetoric of an Elizabethan sonneteer or Romantic love poet. Gwilym’s voice always sound natural, even at its most elevated. Here, the diction is flatter, plainer. Even temporary absence is a state of dull, starless loss. Arthritic and tubercular, Tristan Corbière (1845-75) had a short, often dismal life. His single collection, Les Amours Jaunes, was “published at the author’s expense”. The poète maudit (as Verlaine dubbed him) seems to have discovered a kindred spirit in the toad: at least, he had nailed the dried-out corpse of one above the mantelpiece in the family home. Importantly, many of the Watershed poems engage with the human psychology that’s so frequently, and so foolishly, ignored at the present tumultuous “watershed” moment. Padel uncovers the mirror, reveals the universality of climate denial. She allows us a small smile towards our inner Mrs Noah, who tries operatically to resist boarding the Ark, and has to be “dragged up the gangplank / waving a goblet / shouting I will stay with my gossips.” (Rehearsing Noye’s Fludde). On the other hand, there’s the “blast / of climate terror,” the sudden, equally incapacitating sensation “as if a pub in that crystal cave at the end of the world / held a darts match for the blind / and the boards were our bodies … our hearts.” (Lady of the Lake). Few of the poems are as painful as that image, but they all dramatise the loss we face.

Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Alexandrina begins the poem with a moment of dramatic recognition, so that we immediately hear the first of the two voices and recognise the oral nature of the composition. The orality is underlined by the supple free-range rhythmic movement, and the variety of stanza structure and metre. As a poem, The North Wind is a kind of Ode – one with two singers. Perhaps Anne had read Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind (published in 1820) and decided a less compact and formal style than Shelley’s would best embody the North Wind’s declamations, although she may be sounding her own political note when the prisoner commands the wind, “O speak of liberty”. “Liberty” is a term, after all, that implies something more humanly pertinent than the freedom of the mountains. The poet’s “sweet impudence” is apparent in the generally colloquial diction, but above all in his choice of double- or triple- word rhymes: “end go”/ “window”, “rude as you”/ “nude as you”. A joyful list of the sparrow’s faults in verse four is purposely unconvincing, especially when he repeats himself in “sweetly rude”. The speaker for Spontaneity begins. Perhaps he’s invoking the famous letter from John Keats to John Taylor (1818) in which the young poet announced his view that “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”. Prose poetry is a genre that particularly interests the poet-theologian Hannah Stone. Her passion for the genre is reflected in previous anthology publications, a chapter in the essay collection Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice and three unpublished pamphlets in preparation – among them, the enticingly named Twenty-Nine Volumes.There wasn’t love but there was what love becomes —”. This is an enticingly authoritative opening statement: who doesn’t want to know what love is and isn’t and what it sometimes becomes? In which direction will the speaker send us? Love poetry is a long-lived, heavily worked genre: queer love poetry is part of that tradition, but, if not always silenced, it has been muffled and narrowly boxed inside it. Now, if a queer poet has Olayiwola’s skill, passion and daring, they can re-launch reader expectations and alter the gravitational forces that bind us.