Loneliness is still something we don’t want to talk about or see
The lone Queen at Prince Philip’s funeral was enough to soften any republican heart
The Queen takes her seat during the funeral of Prince Philip
Credit: WPA Pool/Getty
The Queen all alone, with a mask and brimmed hat, was an image that melted even my hardened republican heart. Could no one sit near her when she had been fully vaccinated and now that restrictions are starting to lift? Something was being over-egged here. If the Queen symbolises the nation, then onto her inscrutable loss we projected all kinds of feelings.
Empty Nest: Poems for Families, edited by Carol Ann Duffy review â the agony of absence
Fathers, mothers and grownup children reflect on leaving home and the âdance between closeness and distanceâ in an outstanding anthology
Carol Ann Duffy: her house âpinesâ when her daughter is away. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images
Carol Ann Duffy: her house âpinesâ when her daughter is away. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images
Tue 16 Mar 2021 05.00 EDT
This is not, as is the usual rule of this column, a collection but an outstanding anthology in which fathers, mothers and grownup children speak of themselves and, sometimes, to one another. A new form of homesickness is identified in which it is home itself that sickens. In the poem from which the anthology gets its title, Carol Ann Duffy suggests that her house âpinesâ when her daughter is away. Gabriel Griffin in Alone describes his homeâs echoing uncanniness, a â
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Kaleem Hawa‘s poem, ‘Learned Helplessness’, first published in the
The Poetry Review last year, is the subject of
Katrina Naomi‘s online critique for The Poetry Society’s ‘In Front of the Poem’ series.
It’s a poem that works at speed, Katrina Naomi writes: “I find myself considering how much the box of the prose poem contains my eyes, forcing them to whizz on down the lines. But the main reason that the impetus in Hawa’s poem works is that […] I am keen to find out what happens next, as if I were reading a thriller. ‘Learned Helplessness’ is genuinely exciting, even if – like any good poem – it doesn’t reveal all of its secrets, no matter how much I’ve forced myself to slow down to read it, and how many times. […] Yet for all of the form’s solidity, and the poem’s tremendous narrative arc, nothing feels real.”