This is Episode 95 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "On the Death of the Beloved" by John O'Donohue.

John O’Donohue was an Irish poet and Celtic spiritual teacher and leader whose death at the age of just 52 in 2008 is still much mourned by his legions of admirers and students.

His brother Pat, reflecting on his life, said:

"He was not a finite act that existed and is now lost for evermore. He is just a story that is written, spoken and lives amongst us. Just as we are and continue to be."

As he is mourned, O’Donohue in this poem gives all who will ever mourn—which is, of course, all of us—a passport to a way through that mourning, embracing it for what it is and what it means, telling us in a way that death is life as much as life is life, and our mature reflection on that, our bonded relationship with it, deepens the meaning both of the time we’re here and the time after.

You can find another poem by John O’Donohue, "Beannacht", in Episode 17 of this podcast here.

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This is Episode 94 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "A Seeming Stillness" by David Whyte.

David Whyte is an English poet whose work has drawn a phenomenal following in recent years. His work seems to have tapped into something vital in the world right now, something all of us hunger after, some deep and profound connection with the land beneath us, the air around us and — importantly — to each other, across uncrossable time and unbridgeable space.

This is the third time works by David Whyte have featured in this podcast. You can search in your podcast player for Episode 7, "Sometimes" and Episode 38 "The Bell and the Blackbird". And as I mentioned in those episodes too, as always with poetry by David Whyte, please do seek out and find recordings or videos of the poet reading his own work. He has a truly unique delivery that elevates the works to something much more than words on a page.

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This is Episode 93 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "On Friendship" by Kahlil Gibran.

Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanon-born American poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was educated in Beirut, Boston and Paris and during his lifetime considered himself to be mainly a painter.

This piece, "On Friendship", is one of the most popular pieces in his most popular book, The Prophet, which was published in 1923.

The Prophet — a collection of 26 prose poetry fables touching on everything from self-knowledge to crime, marriage to joy, talking to teaching — has been published in more than 100 languages and is one of the best-selling books of all time. In the 100 years since its publication it has never been out of print.

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This is Episode 92 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "Driving Dad to The Dog Museum" by Gailmarie Pahmeier.

Gailmarie Pahmeier is the Poet Laureate of the state of Nevada in the US. She taught creative writing and contemporary literature at the University of Nevada, Reno, for thirty-seven years. She has published three collections of poetry and a number of chapbooks. This poem was included in her 2014 collection, The Rural Lives of Nice Girls.

"Driving Dad to the Dog Museum" is a poem about aging, and what aging does to us and the people close to us, and what it does to that most precious and intangible thing of all: our memories of who we, and they, used to be, and no longer are.

As with every poem in every episode of this podcast, these introductions are intended as a first jumping off point, not a final judgment. If a poem says something to you — something more or something different than I mention here — allow it to speak. 

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This is Episode 91 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "Neither Now Nor Never" by Kaveh Akbar.

Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet. Born in Tehran, he has lived in the US since he was two years old.

Still just 34, he teaches at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Iowa, Randolph College Virginia and Warren Wilson College North Carolina. Since 2020 he has been Poetry Editor of The Nation magazine, a position held in the past by poets such as WB Yeats, Anne Sexton and Langston Hughes.

He has written and spoken about his challenges with addiction, and has said that writing poetry has often been instrumental in helping him stay alive. 

This poem is about heaven and our relationship with it. Is it a place? A concept? Who is heaven for? And what exactly is to be found there?

And as always on this podcast, these introductions are intended as a first jumping off point, not a final judgment. If this poem or any poem here says something more or something different to you, allow it to speak.

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This is Episode 90 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "I love the dark hours of my being" by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet who came from the old Austro-Hungarian empire which existed until the end of World War I. This is the second piece by Rilke to feature in this podcast. You can find "Go to the Limits of Your Longing" in Episode 41.

One of the interesting things about Rilke’s work — and, very likely, in the work of all writers who write primarily in a different language to English — is the way translations contrast with each other so vividly. It is not a case, I think, that the translator tries to capture the original word for word. Instead, the translation is itself a standalone piece. This translation is by Mark S Burrows. Burrows is a writer, teacher and historian of medieval Christianity based in Maine in the US. He has taught at universities in Europe and America, and facilitates poetry retreats and workshops on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

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This is Episode 89 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "Something wonderful has happened it is called you" by Emily Critchley.

Emily Critchley is a Greek-born English poet, writer, editor and academic. She is the author of Ten Thousand Things and editor of Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK and co-editor of #MeToo, A Poetry Collective.

Critchley is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich, London.

This poem "Something wonderful has happened it is called you" — about motherhood and the future — was a "Highly Commended Poem" in the Forward Book of Poetry 2019.

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This is Episode 88 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem is "The Mayo Tao" by Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon was an Irish poet who died in the autumn of 2020 at the age of 78.

One of the things I noticed when I picked up the New Selected Poems published by Faber and Faber was how lovely the poems look on the page. They are neat, tidy, structured, but they’re not afraid to go to places, and bring you with them.

This poem is, to me, a reflection on ambition, on work, on striving for perfection, and on the appeal of the quiet orderliness of the natural world.

A quick note on the title: The Tao is a concept from Chinese philosophy which points to universal principles, the balance of yin and yang and the harmonious way or path to follow. Mayo is a county in the west of Ireland, on the Atlantic coast.

(For more poems and lyrics relating to the Atlantic coast of Ireland, check out early episodes of this podcast, Number 14 is "Postscript" by Seamus Heaney and 45, "The West Coast of Clare", a lyric by songwriter Andy Irvine.)

Read "The Mayo Tao" by Derek Mahon here

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This is Episode 87 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

It is the first time Philip Larkin has featured on this podcast but it's unlikely to be the last.

Larkin was a 20th century English poet, writer and career librarian. He is raw, rambunctious, rude, sometimes lewd.

This poem, "Money", is Larkin’s reflection on the role of cash and consumerism in life. It was first published in 1973 and half a century on, as all of us — at least in the so-called West — try to make a living amid rising inflation, interest rate hikes, pension fund problems and next-day Amazon Prime delivery of a billion items, it is probably even more relevant today than it was back then.

Read "Money" by Philip Larkin here

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This is Episode 86 of Poems for the Speed of Life.

Today's poem "Funeral Prayer" by Don Paterson.

Don Paterson is a Scottish poet, writer and jazz guitarist. He was the poetry editor for London publishers Picador for over 25 years and teaches in the school of English at the University of St Andrews. He was written or edited more than 15 collections and anthologies, including 40 Sonnets, from which today’s poem comes. 

“Funeral Prayer” reminds me of a poem by another Scottish poet, Norman McCaig, “Praise of a Man”, which you can find and listen to in Episode 42 of this podcast. Like McCaig’s poem, “Funeral Prayer” takes the form of a short eulogy on the death of an admired friend.

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