From poems of memory, the poet moves onto poems about mortality and the ruins of time, then to poems that reflect more widely on human experience in the third and final section.
Richard McKane; Bloodaxe Books Ltd ISBNN 1-85224-063-6 2000 The Cofplete Poems of Anna Akhmatova (trans. Judith Hemschemeyer; ed. Roberta Reeder); Zephyr Press; ISBN 0-939010-27-5 2004 ThatWord That Causes Death's Defeat: Poems of Memory (Annals of Communism) (trans. Nancy Anderson).
The Four Quartets are poems about a nation and about a culture which is very severely under threat, and in a sense, you could describe The Four Quartets as a poem of memory, but not the memory of one individual but the memory of a whole civilization".
Last month, Christopher Reid deservedly won the Costa Book the Year Award for A Scattering (Areté, £7.99), his finely wrought and deeply felt sequence of poems in memory of his late wife, Lucinda Gane.
"A Fight in Poland" and "Laying the Fire", both poems rooted in specific memories, are the strongest of the works on offer.
His other collections of poems include Satura (1962), Accordi e pastelli (1962; "Harmony and Pastels"), Il colpevole (1966), and Xenia (1966), the last work a gentle and evocative series of love poems in memory of his wife, who died in 1963.
Mr. Gilberto is drawn toward poems of observation and memory: on waiting for a woman ("Rosa Morena,") his home state of Bahia (Gilberto Gil's "Eu Vim da Bahia"), the ineffable effect of samba on ducks ("O Pato") and humans ("Samba da Minha Terra").
As in other poems, the saving action of memory is evoked in the end... Shivani: You repeat the line "That also is Jerusalem" in "From 'The Year of the Dragon'" from the preceding poem.
In Sonnet 30, "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought," a poem partly about the actions of memory that the poem's continued existence requires, I consistently replace the word "hid" with my own paler version, "lost".
He committed vast numbers of poems to memory and studied the associated lore of battles, genealogies, and folk stories.
