Contemporary Poetry – Interesting Literature

‘But now there is no ever going home’: A Poem about the Year 2020

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle introduces his own venture into the world of poetry

At the beginning of 2020 I had little faith in this Government, but it turns out I was stupidly optimistic. Johnson (‘agent of chaos’, as I like to call him, after the Norman Spinrad novel of 1967 which features a protagonist called Boris Johnson) and his Cabinet have attracted widespread opprobrium in the wake of the double-whammy of a looming no-deal Brexit and the chaotic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Best Twenty-First-Century Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Poetry continues to be an important force in the world in the twenty-first century, and is arguably reaching, and being enjoyed by, more readers than ever before, as the rise of Instagram poetry and prominent YouTubers demonstrates.

A Short Analysis of Simon Armitage’s ‘Chainsaw versus the Pampas Grass’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The contemporary British poet Simon Armitage allowed his poem ‘Chainsaw versus the Pampas Grass’ to be published online on the Oxford Today site, so we hope he wouldn’t mind our offering a few words about this poem, by way of tentative analysis.

Nadija Rebronja’s Poetry of the Everyday

By Luna Gradinšćak

One young Serbian artist, Nadija Rebronja, tries to put 21st-century reality into a poetic form, in her Flamenco utopia. Born in 1982, she writes about contemporary life by listening to others in her presence. Whether it is a friend, acquaintance or just some noises on the street, she puts herself in a listener’s position and conveys a sort of perceived reality in her poems. The simplicity (but not banality) with which the author transforms philosophical disagreements of the 21st century allows her to achieve something of the effect that we find in the work of great contemporary poets, such as Vasko Popa. Rebronja’s effort to poeticise the unpoetic reminds us of Popa. Here is one of Rebronja’s poems: