Listen to poetic audio dynamite
IF YOU RESEARCH or google ‘ the sounds of poetry’, doubtless you’ll be bombarded with references to rhyme, and to word repetition, similarity of sound, the flow, even alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia. A complex business, to say the least, but not without its justification.
Most times when we encounter or enjoy poetry, it’s a private matter, the words are absorbed in silence, not as part of a greater audience attending the main stage, or a witness to a performance delivered from atop a soap-box at Speakers Corner.
That’s the nature of the thing, always has been, but, so sad that all too often we might never realise what we’ve missed. The beautiful sounds of the combination of words on the page and the wonderful impact they can have on our ears.
Our educational system does afford our students the opportunity, briefly, to encounter poetry read out loud, to bear witness to the written word, spoken, in the classroom, and any English teacher worth their salt will emphasise, given the right poem or poet, the wonder of the work’s sound. Take a bow if Fern Hill by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas sprung to mind! You get what I mean.
Keeping the Welsh link, yet also closer to home here in Wexford, this week, allow me to share with you some poetic audio dynamite. Joe Neal, Castlebridge resident, is one of the finest poets in the Southeast. The Southeast of Everywhere! Born halfway up a Welsh mountain, and having lived between there and Colchester in Essex before settling here in Wexford, Joe has allowed all that surrounded him, shape him, and lived to beautifully write and share the tales.
He is a wordsmith. A sounds genius. A shaper and creator of glorious lines that deserve to be read out loud and allowed resonate. I’m lucky. I’ve enjoyed listening to Joe read, I have heard first hand that voice that has threaded the boards quoting Shakespeare, and has read Heaney and Betjeman for the BBC. But to listen to him read his own colourful, charming poems with their layers of musicality is a step up toward verbal utopia.
Keep an eye and an ear open for Joe, pictured below, around the Wexford locality, and in the meanwhile, read this fine, fine poem out loud to yourself, to another or to a few.
The Awakening
Hush, savour now the silence
Of the white wide-face owl, surprised by cloud redempted moon; while, on ground below, a stealth of noddle mushrooms nudge the soil away and discreetly swell upon themselves, blending musky sweetness with the velvet ruffled air; then hear, more clearly now, the distant plunge of snigging pike, parting shoal of sash-striped perch in hunger plunder under scintillating surface of the lake
Nothing sleeps as lizard creeps from out the rock in search of moisture lush and chance of insect sustenance; even dainty sorrel unfurls it’s curling petals, sheltered by the shudder drift of fern; soon the geese and duck appear in straggle arrow flight toward horizon light and roosting birds detach themselves from masking thatch of tree to re-begin their pattern dance across the sky
– and red replaces silver of the light.
Fogra: Joe Neal was the winner of The Anthony Cronin Poetry Award at last year’s Wexford Literature Festival. Entries are now being accepted for this year’s award.