From Louis MacNeice at the British Library to Elizabeth Bishop’s Filling Station, some poets are good at recording life’s often unnoticed settings. What do you see?
There can at times be a tendency to think of poetry as being primarily concerned with the natural world and fine emotions, a precious art divorced from the realities of everyday life. However, as regular readers of this series know, poems can be and have been written about almost anything. Take buildings, for instance. Most of us spend the best part of the day in or around one or more of the things. The majority are fairly prosaic and their very ubiquity tends to blind us to their features and characteristics – and yet, there is a rich vein of building-inspired poetry out there.
Sometimes buildings impinge on our minds because we go looking for them “tourist-eyed”, as Australian poet Katherine Gallagher puts it in her poem Chartres. Of course, the famous French cathedral is a work of art in itself, but Gallagher skirts around the temptation to indulge in the ekphrastic; her poem does not describe Chartres cathedral itself, but evokes the sensation of approaching it in expectation. Finally, the building is transmogrified, an ark floating above its dull surroundings.
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