Is Music: New and Selected Poems

---

One senses a Buddhist ethos permeating a number of poems sometimes explicitly as in The Elephant Odes — the elephant seen as the avatar of the Buddha.

Imaginative Expansions

She knows giraffes and presents their habits in the biological sense with conviction. She knows her flora and fauna. She reminds us that cranes are associated with Japanese, therefore haiku are an appropriate medium for her verse; there is nostalgia for the time before sophisticated organisation, by which she means modernity, took over. The variety never ceases. Variety takes at least two forms — variety of subject matter across the poems and the variety in the manner with which she delivers them.

In The Domesticity of Giraffes she employs lengthy Latinate lines with a rich vocabulary, and dexterity with almost clinical precision, to deliver what she wants to say.

Sun Music: New and Selected Poems

Male giraffes more often enjoy a homosexual relationship with other males. Thirst in both sexes is overcome by the juice in leaves. So deprivation could not have been shown in a more graphic way than Beveridge has displayed in this devastating poem in which she reverses the natural order to depict an unnatural world.

The waves of different styles and the ripple of tones as we flick through her verse is quite breathtaking. On page 30 lies a surprising piece of creativity.

Product Information

It is Flower of Flowers which is a verse form that has prose-like features. In form it seems to be prose but read aloud it falls into regular poetic rhythm. Variety can be gauged by a means other than subject choice. We are given a lesson in lineation and enjambment when we read Beveridge. Here we have the opening stanzas of The Courtesan and immediately note that the main idea of the line is concluded before the line runs on.

Some have two verses, some have three or four. Generally speaking, the poems are fresh and committed to the reader in an even, conversational tone. Where fierce words are needed they are used but the chat is never disturbed from its even flow. A Girl Swinging is a short girl, hence short lines and simple language; spider webs are complex, hence long twisted sentences, accurately and minutely described; pacifists who follow a leader, are destroyed if they lose their leader — The Caterpillars demonstrates this.

Artist follows the dramatic monologue construction so favoured by Robert Browning in his many poems, but specifically, My Last Duchess. Beveridge incorporates into the poem a deep psychological interest. Her focus appears at first sight to dwell on externality, especially as observed in visual imagery, but an observant reader should not miss her focus on the inward drama of the characters:. There is motion in this poem.

Some poems involve a minimal narrative a walk by a lake, instance ; others are a series of injunctions, painstakingly elaborated. With such technique, it's important to remember that Beveridge also cites Ezra Pound in her introductory note: In poems such as Man Washing on a Railway Platform Outside Delhi and Bahadour Beveridge subtly but clearly shows how the ill-treated subject can still retain his or her dignity.

A fine example is in the closing lines of Bahadour where the young, hard-pressed Nepali delivery boy is able to seize a few minutes late in the day to fly his kite: Comparable moments occur in Beveridge's more recent, five-poem sequence, Camel. Here the poet begins with an affectionate selection of the thousand-plus names that Arabic has for "camel".

It then goes on to detail how, like Australian sheep in the live export trade, camels can also be brutally mistreated. This is unusually direct for Beveridge but telling none the less. To ask other readers questions about Is Music , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia.

Related Books

Oct 04, Sam rated it really liked it Shelves: On the plus side, the book does bring back into print three of the four poems originally included in Peace on Earth. Oct 30, Louise rated it really liked it.

I adore John Taggart. A major retrospective is bound to be slightly uneven though When he's good, he's certainly 5 stars good.

Aug 04, Matthew rated it it was amazing. Terrific gathering of most of the work that's not a long poem there are many. The sample reveals both a devotional attention inside the music and protest as well as an acutely green sensibility.

John Taggart is a living master we should all abide. Jul 02, James Cook rated it really liked it. Taggart is great, though I can only read some of the more repetitive poems when I'm in the right mood.

I wish this volume contained material from Dodeka. Interestingly, the first poem in this volume, "The Drum Thing", I had only read in The Gist of Origin anthology and find that here it is heavily revised, with many lines cut out. I like both versions but actually prefer the Origin version a little bit, because of its strangeness and its awkward wording and syntax.

Taggart is actually best liste Taggart is great, though I can only read some of the more repetitive poems when I'm in the right mood. Taggart is actually best listened to: Or I recommend that you read these poems aloud, slowly, to yourself when reading them. Also, if you dig this, check out the poems of Theodore Enslin, particularly the late ones.

Most Viewed in Entertainment

• A Stranger in the Land (The Hidden Evil Series Book 1)
• Grief, Loss and Bereavement: Evidence and Practice for Health and Social Care Practitioners
• Im Spannungsfeld nationalkultureller und supranationaler kultureller Kräfte: National Versus Supranational Cultural Forces (German Edition)
• Some Winter Days in Iowa
• Army of One
• The Invitation
• Lets All Find Awesome Jobs