Patience Agbabi (1965-)

Gwyneth Lewis

(1959)

MOTHER TONGUE.

'I started to translate in seventy-three in the schoolyard. For a bit of fun to begin with the occasional "fuck" for the bite of another language's smoke at the back of my throat, its bitter chemicals. Soon I was hooked on whole sentences behind the shed, and lessons in Welsh seemed very boring. I started on print, Jeeves & Wooster, Dick Francis, James Bond, in Welsh covers. That worked for a while until Mam discovered Jean Plaidy inside a Welsh concordance one Sunday night.

Tobias Hill (1970)

Paul Muldoon (1951-)

Gathering Mushrooms As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father the taste of dill, or tarragonhe could barely tell one from the otherfilled his mouth. It seemed as if he might smother. Why should he be stricken with grief, not for his mother and father, but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter In Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregonhe could barely tell one from the otherand why should he now savour the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin, as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?

Philip Larking
(1922-1985) to write a poem was to construct a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely producing it in whoever read the poem

Talking in the bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest, Lying together there goes back so far, An emblem of two people being honest. Yet more and more time passes silently. Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest Builds and disperses clouds in the sky, And dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why At this unique distance from isolation It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind

(1930-1998)

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

Tony Harrison