Poetry Daily

Snow by Vijay Nambisan. Vijay Nambisan was a poet, writer, critic and journalist from India writing in English

‘The Way My Mother Speaks’ by Carol Ann Duffy describes a speaker’s developing connection to her mother’s way of speaking.

Maya Angelou's "Alone" is a poem that deals with togetherness by placing emphasis on being alone; quite an irony. It is a lyrical "thinking out loud", a reflection on what it is to be a human and 'out here' in the big wide world.

"‘If—‘ is an inspirational poem that provides advice on how one should live one’s life. The poem takes the reader through various ways in which the reader can rise above adversity that will almost certainly be thrown one’s way at some point."

"The poem depicts a person’s selfless and pure love for another. It is about two choices a boy has given to a girl, whether the girl will forget him or will come to him. He has designed the two alternatives by the way of various fancy consequences which are under stated."

Huntington does not gloss over the tough stuff.  Her choice of words is amazing, capturing the helplessness of the narrators.  In addition to abuse, she writes about sickness, experience stemming from her Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis. Huntington’s poetry is not meant to soothe.  It does not have flowery visuals or happy scenarios.  The tales she weaves are dark and gritty, but at the same time defiant and inspiring.  The narrators in her poems suffer, but there is strength in their pain.

"The poem describes a "caged bird"—a bird that is trapped in a “narrow cage” with limited mobility, only able to sing about the freedom it has never had and cannot attain. This caged bird is an extended metaphor for the African American community’s past and on-going experience of race-based oppression in the United States in particular, and can also be read as portraying the experience of any oppressed group. The metaphor captures the overwhelming agony and cruelty of the oppression of marginalized communities by relating it to the emotional suffering of the caged bird."

"In “A Letter,” the word for the police's stamp sounds like the word for an attack or ambush, and so elegantly we have the police raiding the revolutionaries even as they mark their documents. Pritam seems determined in the last stanza to go off the rails of the conceit, with the book suddenly capable of smell."

Although best known as a poet, Daniel Abse worked in the medical field, and was a physician in a chest clinic for over thirty years. He received numerous literary awards and fellowships for his writing. 

The main theme of the poem One Art by Elizabeth Bennet is the inevitability and pain of loss. "One Art" displays the idea of loss while relating it to life changes that are inevitable with the passage of time.