Up to recently, my mother and I read poetry together once a week, usually on a Monday afternoon. I really did enjoy Rafael Alberti’s poems for children. The book included drawings done by him. Many of the poems are about the sea, too, because Alberti really loved the sea. He came from a place near the sea and when he was in Madrid, far from the sea, he really missed the sea. My father is like him. At heart he needs to live by the sea and his dream is to have a sailboat. I would like to see the film Beowulf.

I have a hard time reading poetry, any kind of poetry, alone. I get impatient, and then altogether distracted.
Once in a while, I like to read short, “simple,� preferably near-nonsense sing-song poems with my son. This is anything from Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes or Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses to the Alberti book Oscar mentions above.
As for epic-style poems, I always enjoyed those that were read and discussed in class when I was a schoolgirl, and I will never forget the one titled Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie, by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Evangeline is an Acadian girl who is betrothed to her sweetheart, Gabriel, but they are separated as the British deport the Acadians from Canada. The poem then follows Evangeline across the landscapes of America as she looks for Gabriel. At one point the lovers actually just miss one another! So sad, so much bad luck. In the end, Evangeline is an old nurse and in the midst of an epidemic she finds Gabriel among the stricken and dying. So so sad.
I never forget the name and story of Evangeline. Evangeline is my heroine. LISTEN! THAT RHYMED!

Do you know a thesis that reduce all the storyboards to four possibilities? Initiation rite, discovery rite, training period or the battle against the bad forces. The whole stories you can imagine could be reduced into these four ones. And on the top the four possibilities had been written by Classic Greeks.
Nothing it’s new. We have said all we can say. We can change the envelopment, the technology or the audiovisual effects in order to adapt nowadays, but at last the humans beings haven’t changed so much since the Classic times. We are telling the same stories and sometimes we are beginning with the same words.

I studied English Literature at university. In my university, English Literature was dealt with in inverse chronological order. In the first year, we studied 20th-century literature. In the second year, we went back to the 19th-century, which was delightful because I love Victorian literature. The third year concentrated on the 17th and 18th centuries, which, to be honest, I found a wee bit boring. And then, in the fourth year, we read anything written before 1616 – the year of Shakespeare’s death.
So it was in fourth year college when I read Beowulf. It was a lot of fun to try to read it out loud in Old English, but then I always had to resort to the Modern English translation on the right-hand side of the page. We only went through it briefly. Our next big stop was centuries later, with The Canterbury Tales. This, I enjoyed more. Most of the tales are in verse. The English is known as Middle English, so it is much easier to understand than Old English. And some of the tales are such an interesting read: stories of lust, avarice, death, hate… as Toni said, the same stories of nowadays!

Love, whether it be of poetry, music, painting, theatre or whatever, just bites and, particularly when it’s for the first time, can be quite frightening and quite wonderful. Emotions flower within you that you didn’t know you had. Those around you often find it difficult to understand your infatuation. But, as you say Dónal, one can see and hear so much uninspiring stuff before finding the gems. Consumerism and the instant gratification culture growing up around it make it difficult for people to persevere. So many distractions can throw one off one’s course. Tune to that station, change that channel, click on that link for instantly available, bite-sized chunks of entertainment.

I’m sorry but I never liked Beowulf. I couldn’t down it in high school British Literature and I couldn’t down it at university, either (Paola: we did it the other way around, in chronological order, a bad idea). Writing an exam on kennings will do it for you. I am not Mr. Metaphor. Bone house does not impress me.
I do, however, like Thomas Gray (especially Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) and later poetry, some Romantic and then a lot of 19th century American poetry (I am biased maybe).
And a random piece of data: most of the public elementary schools in Sioux City, Iowa, are named after American Poets. I went to Joy and Longfellow. We also had Whittier, Hawthorne, and Emerson, to name a few…
I sing the body electric…