Blanche Librarian's Poetry Corner!!

Yo Swipesters!!!

In our third (and almost certainly final) attempt to graft a workable blog series onto the lame pun/cutesy broad photo amalgam that is Blanche Librarian, we offer for your delectation and delight the first of hopefully many installments of the ALL NEW COLUMN from the laser pen of the Information Assistant we'd all most like to have run her elegant finger nail up and down our spines as she looks us up and plucks us off the stacks.......ladeeeeeeeezangennelmenn, I give you the one, the only, the incomparably knowledgeable.......


Ms. BLANCHE LIBRARIAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Hi, I'm Blanche and this week's book of the week is a newly published volume of recently discovered poem's by one of England's greatest poets. Thought long lost, the new anthology of first drafts and alternative versions of works by Philip Larkin



throws a fascinating new light on one of England's most distinctive (and provincial!) voices. She..., the first of our extracts shows the playful, tender style of Larkin's juvenilia. Note the exotic motifs underpinning and ironicising what is, on the surface, a prosaic, almost nursery rhyme sequence:

She...

She...
Went to Spain,
But never again
The men there drove her crackers

They...
Stood outside
Her window at night
Shaking their maraccas

This next extract provides an excellent example of the way in which Larkin hones his material. In Desdemona, an early draft of one of his finest poems, Love Again, we see how the original poem's classicism is muted as the poem evolves although the theme of the cruel rebuke of distant youthful love that will dominate the finished poem are here sketched out in a looser, more informal voicing.

Desdemona?
Des O'Connor more like!
Get out of that sunshine!!
You're very tall.
I've just been irrigating the desert.
Have you got the scrolls?
No, I always walk like this.
Play your cards right sunshine and you could be in for
A quick bit of Hello folks -
And what about the workers?
Oh, you are stood up...
What a belter. eh?
Way-heh!


Happy reading,


Blanche

xxx


(Back on Thursday),


Love on y'all,



Bob



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