In The Poetry

Before my boy was born – I didn’t know it was a boy obviously – but before this child was born I was frightened that I might not like this child who was going to come and live with us. I think this is a thing a lot of expectant mothers fear but you’re not [...]

Here we have a sad poem that records the time I went to my Grandma’s funeral.

Until Gran Died

The minnows I caught
lived for a few days in a jar
then floated side-up on the surface.
We buried them beneath the hedge.
I didn’t cry,
but felt sad inside.

I thought
I could deal with funerals
that is
until Gran died.

The goldfish [...]

Jerusalem

1

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone,
And the interrogation will not die
For there is no eternal city
And there is no pity
And there is nothing underneath the sky
No rainbow and no guarantee -
There [...]

Thomas and Beulah is a book of poems which is actually a sequence of poems – a double sequence. These poems tell the story of a marriage – two African-Americans who came to age during the 20th Century. Thomas gets work in the rubber factories of Akron, Ohio which were exploding so rapidly that they [...]

of DeWitt Williams on his way to the Lincoln Cemetery

He was born in Alabama.
He was bred in Illinois.
He was nothing but a
Plain black boy.

Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot.
Nothing but a plain black boy.

Drive him past the Pool Hall.
Drive him past the Show.
Blind within his casket,
But maybe he will know.

Down through Forty-seventh Street:
Underneath the [...]

The Grain of Things

Beware of what’s uniform, lapidary, slick.

As if a twisting country lane
where shadows bow and curtsy
were to be avoided
because of its green spine and blisters;
or it were desirable
that literary translations should not sound
foreign and close to the originals.

Waxen-skinned fruit is apt
to taste less sweet than the pocked potato
and ruckled pomegranate.

Let me have about [...]

From early on, from boyhood, I was haunted by chalk landscapes which I first saw from the back of my parents’ car. Many years later I looked at paintings by Paul Nash who was also obviously haunted by the same and similar chalk landscapes. This poem is called ‘Landscape of the Daylight Moon’.

Landscape of the [...]

Interviewer: In what you say, in the very business of what it is you bring to light and give utterance to there is also a very big element of the instinctive, the instinctive formed by years of devotion to your craft, isn’t there?

Pitter: Yes, indeed. A very big element of that obscurity which is one [...]

The pieces I’m now going to read come from a journal I kept on and off over a number of years. Mostly they concern events on a farm in the middle of Devon. Farming being the absorbing business it is I’ve never written about it systematically but occasionally, after some striking happening, I’ve goaded myself [...]

I began writing what has come to be called War Music in 1959. In the decades that followed, me often not looking at the work for two or three years at a time, I added Pax, GBH, Kings and The Husbands moving about inside translations of The Iliad on which War Music is based. All [...]