Favourites

Someone recently asked me what my favourite ten poems were. I thought that this was probably an impossible question to answer - what I might have chosen as my top ten when I was twenty is likely to be somewhat different now. I have read a lot more in the intervening years.

Yet, some poems from that period would probably still find a place amongst my favourites today. I'm thinking of, say, Tennyson's Lotus-Eaters, which I still read now and then or Wordsworth's Preludes. My taste hasn't essentially changed in that time, though the Romantics are a little too much like rich Belgian chocolate for the kind of reading I used to do.

So what would I include in the top ten. Well, the first few places would go to Thomas Hardy (The Voice, The Journey, amongst others) , the next couple by Philip Larkin (The Whitsun Weddings, Church Going) with a space or two for the above-mentioned Romantics and Victorians. From Robert Frost, maybe After Apple Picking or The Road Not Taken. Aussie poets would be represented (on merit, not sentiment) by Slessor's Country Towns and Murray's The Widower in the Country. But really, there are so many individual standouts by poets whose names I cant even remember, that a list is pretty dishonest device.

Speaking of poems, I dashed off this haiku for my troubled cousin Lisa today. I had space on the back of the page of a letter I had written her, so, I thought I'd doodle something.

jasmine morning
a green bird's insistent arpeggio,
writing to my cousin


A poor effort, yes.