Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry

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The selected poems cover a wide range of styles and subject matter, opening up plenty of material for discussion. It is often profitable to make connections between them, but in Edexcel Paper 3, students are asked to compare a previously unseen poem with one from Poems of the Decade . Re read ‘To My Nine-Year-Old Self’ by Helen Dunmore and ‘From the Journal of a Disappointed Man’ by Andrew Motion. Compare the ways in which both poets portray personal experiences.

Even more interesting is the use of consonance on each corresponding line, for example the first line of each stanza has the “k” sound, “d” on the second and “t” on the third. The only point in which this is broken in the poem is at the end of stanza six, but even this is largely negated by the fact that the next word is “too” so therefore continues the overall consonance. These strong sounds once again evoke ideas of force and control, showing how important this is to the poem. These poems are a testament to the lived experience of the past decade. They provoke, interrogate, excite and console. Above all, they connect – both by allowing us to connect with ourselves and with others. This anthology is a must-have compilation of the very best poetry from the last decade. MAIN BODY: agree - “in a similar vein”, author uses the method of - it is clear that the author is intending to evoke a sense of - author forces readers to confront how universal truth or societal message Use these questions to practice your essential analysis and comparison skills, either as a challenge for AS practice, or for the A Level exam.

These poems were previously prescribed by Edexcel, and as such we have commentary and analysis available. Bright Dead Things is organized into four untitled sections, the first of which opens with “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” which sets the tone for the collection to come—we will be in motion, we will wander, and we will not skirt genuine feeling in favor of irony. “I like the lady horses best, / how they make it all look easy, / like running 40 miles per hour / is as easy as taking a nap, or grass,” she writes. The speaker of the poem admits that she likes the horses mainly because they’re ladies, which means she might share something elemental with them. It means “that somewhere inside the delicate / skin of my body, there pumps / an 8-pound female horse heart.” This is a book that will not hesitate to talk about heart, to name that heart. Identity: Concepts of personal identity are a key part of ‘An Easy Passage’ due to the idea of self-development and growing up, claiming an identity within the world. This is also a key aspect of many cultures view on the idea of a rite of passage. Power: Throughout ‘Eat Me’ the idea of power is very important because it is fundamental to the ‘feeder’ relationship. Without this power it wouldn’t be able to operate, and the objectification and possession would not be able to take place.

Let me tell you about “Romantic Comedies,” perhaps my all-time favorite contemporary poem, which consists of premises for romantic comedies: “She likes things one way and he likes them the other” and “She’s a pale-skinned aesthete who edits a webzine, and he’s a suntanned meathead completely perplexed by the masthead” and “He calls Nashville, laughingly, Nashvegas, but she calls Nashville, icily, Nashville.” Besides being funny, this collection also believes deeply in connection, in—yes—love. Besides being funny, this collection also believes deeply in connection, in—yes—love. “I still love the river, I told her,” Leidner writes in “The River.” “But I do not love it because it is deep, and fast, and drowns many people. I love it because it runs behind my house, and I have lived above it forever.” – Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor The careful, meditative sentences that form Phillips’ poems give the impression of a speaker who is profoundly compassionate to themselves, one who gives themselves the space and time to articulate ambiguity without striving to resolve it, and who can recognize what is beautiful without clinging to it. In Wild is the Wind, questions about attachment and commitment unfold deliberately, and to read them is to listen, carefully, to meditations like this:Society and Culture: It can be interpreted that while the poem considers cultural ideas such as growing up and rites of passage, there are also broader criticisms of the concept of adulthood such as the ‘drab’ working worlds and the plans and dreams which constantly fail to come to fruition.

Use these questions to practice your essential essay writing skills, and consolidate your understanding of individual prescribed poems.In this course, John McRae (University of Nottingham) explores the twenty poems that make up the ‘Poems of the Decade’ cluster for A Level English Literature (Edexcel). Each poem is read in detail, with a short commentary highlighting aspects of language, style, themes, motifs, and so on. In the case of Patience Agbabi’s ‘Eat Me’, for example, we think about the extent to which we can identify the speaker of the poem with the author herself, the question of whether the couple of the poem can be decribed as happy, and the influence of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (1836) and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865). When we come to Simon Armitage’s ‘Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass’, we think about the theme of man versus nature, the concept of ‘anthropomorphisation’, and the final lines of the poem in which it has become clear that the pampas grass has beaten the chainsaw. And so on for the whole selection.

Poems of the Decade is a celebration of the last ten years of poetry published in the UK and Ireland. The 100 poems contained in this anthology were selected from the many thousands of poems submitted to the Forward Prizes for Poetry over the past ten years. It is the perfect introduction to a wide range of contemporary poetry: works that speak of violence, danger and fear, of love and all that opposes love, in forms of language broken and reshaped by the need to communicate what it is to be alive now, here. Last year, in an interview with Krista Tippett of On Being, Tracy K. Smith described the act of writing poetry as perpetually, and necessarily, expansive:

- regular/irregular line length?

Compare the ways in which personal development and experience are presented in ‘The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled’ by Leonita Flynn and ‘An Easy Passage’ by Julia Copus How effective is Agbabi’s use of imagery, specifically in relation to the way in which size and scale are described? Consider the impact on a reader. It is easy enough to think of history as more-or-less the diligent assemblage of fact, a collective project aiming at the one true chronology of who we are and where we come from; this, of course, is a lie told by the victors, the reigning “WE” of so many middle-school text books who’ve always known that myth maps over power, and that the dominant story yields the dominant people. Robin Coste Lewis sees this lie and seeks to dismantle it with Voyage of the Sable Venus, her astonishing 2015 debut collection, the (perhaps) unlikely and (definitely) deserving winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.