Saturday 23 May 2009

A Poet's Guide To Britain

I still haven't watched the Sylvia Plath programme on iPlayer, but I caught the repeat of this week's programme, about George Mackay Brown, on Thursday night, and enjoyed it. He's a poet I like a lot, although I've not read nearly enough of his work.

One thing I'd have liked to heard more about was how much his poetry owed to Old Norse. It's there in the compressed, pared-down nature of his writing, as they suggested, but his style also features, I think, his own version of kennings. Again, half an hour wasn't really enough to do the poet justice.

2 comments:

Mark McGuinness said...

Agreed half an hour isn't enough, but it's still refreshing to have half an hour of poetry on TV. I've not seen the Mackay Brown one yet but the Plath and Wordsworth were pretty good.

Matt Merritt said...

Absolutely, Mark. Same goes for any of the programmes they are putting on at the moment - any poetry on TV has to be better than none, and some of it has been excellent.

I only saw the second half of this week's programme, about Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did, so I must watch the whole thing over the weekend.