Untitled Books

Glyn Maxwell is impressed by the praise poems submitted for his National Poetry Day-themed workshop

These are the seven most praiseworthy praise poems: they celebrate prime minister Balfour, J Robert Oppenheimer, a henchman, a baby, green leaves, depression, and someone called E.D., which is just the sort of barking motley crew I was hoping for. Each of them is thoughtful and generous - two qualities absent from much contemporary verse - and each displays a keen sensitivity to appropriate form: when to rhyme or not; when to break the line or not; when to leap up; when to shut up. In other words, to paraphrase the poet Fatboy Slim, they are praising like they should.
 
 
      For E.D. by CJ Allen
 
      I'm hymning your silence, your solitude,
      and I'm doing it quietly, as you did,
      in tiny cathedrals of words.
 
      I'm singing the smallness, the shut-in love,
      the howling heart and lips that grieve
      for everything afterwards.
 
      I'm extolling the rolling interior
      prairie as superior
      to realer real estate.
 
      I'm honouring geometries
      of light, the way its slants can praise
      the inarticulate.
 
      I'm glorifying dots and dashes,
      spectral things, the ghosts of wishes,
      half-closed doors and shadows.
 
      I'm rhapsodizing modesties,
      the reveries of bumble-bees
      in clover-crowded meadows.
 
      I'm magnifying what it is
      to overhear the muffled voices,
      knock in other rooms.
 
      I'm tipping the hat to the world beneath
      the window, the magnolia breath
      of summer when it comes.
 
 
This is very well done, extremely alert to sound and structure. Look how the first two lines of each stanza suggest companionship in their half-rhyme, as do the third and sixth, the ninth and twelfth, and so on. The foreshortened third lines of each stanza allow in some fresh air, a dignified intake of breath as it waits for new light. Love is freedom played upon laws, like music is, and this is.