Judi’s Reviews > Poem for the Day One > Status Update

Playwright Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats' associate, died May 22nd 1932

Christopher Smart died in a debtors' prison, May 21st 1771

Magnificat
for Sian, after thirteen years

...

when we met, I tell you
it was a birthday party, a funeral
it was a holy communion
between women, a Visitation

it was two old she-0goats butting
and nuzzling each other in the smelly fold


Michéle Roberts
(May 20th 1949 — )

Slough

...

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
and paint their nails.

come, brined bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
the cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

John Betjeman
(August 28th 1906 — May 19th 1984)

Novelist and cerebral poet George Maricith died May 18th 1909.

Oft in the Stilly Night

Thomas Moore
(May 28th 1779 — February 25th 1852)

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin, the son of a Catholic grocer. His Poems of 1801 and his talent as a singer were his e entrée into high society. He married Betsy Dyke, and actress, and they lived in Wiltshire. His Irish Melodies brought him an income of £500 a year.

Feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich, who wrote the polemical poem 'The Phenomenology of Anger', was born in Baltimore May 16th 1929.

Because I could not stop for Death

Emily Dickinson
(December 10th 1830 — May 15th 1886)

...Some of her verses circulated privately in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a largely condescending group who pitied her eccentricity.

1. A tull tippet is a neck and shoulder scarf made of fine netting

Psalm 23
A psalm of David

King Davied
(Died c. 990 BC)

... Psalm 23 was written about two and a half thousand years ago, and is one of the 73 psalms (out of the 150) that have been attributed by scholars to King David himself. On Saul's death, David ruled over Judah from about 1010 BC to 990 BC, annexing Jerusalem in the process, where he built a palace on Mount Zion and installed there the Ark of the Covenant.

The way we live

Kathleen Jamie
(May 13th 1962 — )

Kathleen Jamies's travels, mainly in the East, are reflected in her collections The Way We Live (1987) and The Autonomous Region (1993) and in her travel book The Golden Peake (1992).
Jamie was born in Renfrewshire and now lives in Fife. Her collection the Queen of Sheba was published in 1994.