Feature: National Poetry Day

Published: 7 October, 2010
by JOHN HORDER

NATIONAL Poetry Day (today, Thursday) is about “Angels and Demons” if these two books are anything to go by. 

In Robert Bringhurst’s poem “Jacob Singing”, he reminds us: “My son, you must do more/ than listen to the angel; you must wrestle him.” 

In “Day In, Day Out”, towards the end of 149 pages of powerful poems set among mountains of  great beauty in his native Canada, this dazzlingly pure 63-year-old poet concludes: 

So terror, coming deeply into beauty calms huge hunger with strange food.

I see your face and cannot think or say which is the greater – the damage or the joy, or the end of the world or the ultimate pleasure. 

Bringhurst writes about “angels and demons” in the same tradition as two other volcanic poets, DH Lawrence and Rainer Maria Rilke. He has been described as “undiscovered treasure-trove” by Canadian novelist/poet Margaret Atwood. 

Christopher Reid’s The Song of Lunch, comes with trumpet-like blasts of publicity, after winning the Costa prize. 

In the BBC2 dramatisation tomorrow (Friday) at 9pm, a book editor (Alan Rickman) becomes even more disen­chanted with an old flame (Emma Thompson) over lunch in Soho. Together they trigger one final demonic explosion. 

• Selected Poems. By Robert Bringhurst. Jonathan Cape, £15;
• The Song of Lunch. By Chris­topher Reid. CB editions £7.99