Reviews for Invitation à la lecture 1

The average rating for Invitation à la lecture 1 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-19 00:00:00 Carolyn Alder When I read poetry, I avoid the “doorstoppers,” those formidable weighty volumes of “collected” poems, preferring instead slim volumes of verse which distill the quintessence of a poet’s development over a few years’ time. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that I should love Whitsun Weddings (1964): 46 pages, the product of nine years of inspiration and revision. The result? Almost three dozen poems, each perfect in its own way, a dozen of which will probably be remembered as long as English verse is read aloud. All this is in spite of the fact that Philip Larkin is not a very attractive personality. Passionate about women, devoted to old England, and intoxicated by the sound of early jazz, he was nevertheless too private, too cranky, and too ungenerous to love others or appreciate a society and a culture in the process of transformation. (For example, in spite of his love for jazz, he loathed be-bop and the “corpse-walking” sound of Miles Davis, and hated it when black people started moving on to his mother’s street.) Yet he was merciless in his own self-assessment: his love poems, like “Broadcast”, are often romantic epiphanies experienced in isolation, and in his lonely portraits and ironic monologues, like “Mr. Bleaney,” and “Self’s the Man,” or in the occasional meditation like “Dockery and Son,” Larkin is able to look squarely at the disconsolate man he would one day become. It is perhaps in the poems that depict England herself—menaced by selfish elites, reduced by vulgarity and cheap goods, yet alive even in the vanishing of her customs and traditions—that Larkin is most impressive. He is very good at presenting the vulgarity of advertising (“Sunny Prestatyn,” “Essential Beauties”) and the irreverence of elites (“Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses"), but even better in the reverent, elegaic evocation of English culture and ritual in “Whitsun Weddings,” “MCMXIV,” and “An Arundel Tomb.” The title poem, “The Whitsun Weddings”—which Christopher Hitchens asked to be read to him aloud in the days before his death—is an excellent example of Larkin at his most magnificent and comprehensive best. This subtle, accumulative depiction of a London-bound train journey on Whitsunday—a day when many provincial English couples once married and headed for the metropolis for a “bank holiday” honeymoon—is an unsentimental, yet triumphant, celebration of English love and marriage. Not an easy achievement for a crabby old bachelor like Larkin. I am equally moved, however, by many of the shorter, bleaker poems. They pack quite a punch. Here are a few of my favorites: HOME IS SO SAD Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of the last to go As if to win them back. Instead, bereft Of anyone to please, it withers so, Having no heart to put aside the theft And turn again to what it started as, A joyous shot at how things ought to be, Long fallen wide. You can see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase. TALKING IN BED Talking in bed ought to be easiest, Lying together there goes back so far, An emblem of two people being honest. Yet more and more time passes silently. Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest Builds and disperses clouds in the sky, And dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why At this unique distance from isolation It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind. DAYS What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-26 00:00:00 Harrison Pirtle Talking in bed ought to be easiest, Lying together there goes back so far, An emblem of two people being honest. Yet more and more time passes silently. Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest Builds and disperses clouds about the sky, And dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why At this unique distance from isolation It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.