Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz | John Baker's Blog. The best love poems: writers choose their favourites – interactive. Turn autoplay off Edition: <span><a href=" Sign in Beta About us Today's paper Subscribe Custom Search The best love poems: writers choose their favourites – interactive Lustful gazing, unrequited yearning and passionate wooing – AS Byatt, Seamus Heaney, Hilary Mantel, Jeanette Winterson and many others pick the poems that stole their hearts. Books Culture Life and style Valentine's Day More interactives Hot topics © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Send to a friend Your IP address will be logged Share Short link for this page: Contact us Contact the Books teambooks@theguardian.com Report errors or inaccuracies: userhelp@theguardian.com Letters for publication should be sent to: letters@theguardian.com Close.
Poem of the week: Six Winters by Tomas Tranströmer. Tomas Transtömer. Photograph: Jessica Gow/AFP/Getty Images Tomas Tranströmer, the 80-year-old Swedish poet deservedly honoured last October with the Nobel prize for literature, is the author of this week's poem-sequence, Six Winters, translated by Robin Fulton. It comes from his 1989 collection, För Levande och Döda (For Living and Dead) and is included in a highly recommended New Collected Poems, published recently in an expanded edition by Bloodaxe Books. These six short imagist poems are rather like extended haiku, a form in which the poet has always excelled. They may centre on a single image, or use surreal combinations of imagery, as does the first, with its haunting triad of black hotel, sleeping child and dice. In the second poem, we're deep in the Kingdom of Winter. There's a more anecdotal tone to the next poem. The image of icicle as animal is pursued further in the next tercet.
The fifth takes us farther beyond the window-frame. Six Winters Tonight snow-haze, moonlight. Poetry by Pablo Neruda - Walking Around. Poetry by Pablo Neruda -- Leaning into the Afternoons. That'll teach them – mural records Duffy's rift with exam board that banned her poem - News - Books. On Thursday staff at Leeds West Academy officially launched a mural containing sections of the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy's 2008 poem "Mrs Schofield's GCSE". The piece is a protest against censorship, penned in response to the examination board AQA banning Duffy's 1980s poem "Education for Leisure" from its GCSE syllabus in 2008 after claims it glorified violence. Duffy responded to the ban in verse. The work will also be published in her latest collection, The Bees, released this month.
"The mural reinforces her position as an English teacher's favourite," said Annette Hall, Leeds West Academy's principal. "And it was the English department which chose the poem. The row began in 2008 when Pat Schofield, an external examiner at Lutterworth College, Leicestershire, complained about "Education for Leisure", which she described as "absolutely horrendous".
When AQA banned it from its syllabus and urged schools to burn the text, Duffy responded through her art. There is one small catch. Simon Armitage: 'poetry is a form of dissent' - video interview. Sylvia Plath Reads 'Daddy'