Four poems I read this week

Poems by Damir Šodan, Meghan O'Rourke, Pierre Joris and Alexandra Petri

• 22 September 2025
• reading,
• poetry

This week, a rightwing political figure was murdered in the United States. The right in general and the president in particular were pretty unequivocal about their intention to use this terrible act as a pretext for material attacks on the left.

In the UK, in addition to hosting and flattering that same president, the ruling Labour Party, in the person of the Home Secretary, accused immigrants of making 'vexatious' asylum claims -- a revealing choice of words from a government which has been eager to adopt talking points about immigration from the far right.

Meanwhile, I attended a funeral. I worked. And I tried to write.

Every day or two, I find myself hunting for a poem, almost at random and with no particular objective. It's not an escape so much as a swerve.

Sometimes it seems to me that refraction is as useful as reflection. It's at a slant -- and through triangulation -- that things can make another kind of sense.

Here are four poems that resonated this week.

Poetry in Small Language by Damir Šodan. I love a lonely bell. This one is

tolling mutely in the evening
through the musty provincial air 
self-obliviously 
and quite self-sufficiently

It's heard anyway -- by the poet and by huddled sheep. The poem -- a kind of ringing itself -- reaches us too, mediated through translation from Croatian, its small language.

I am often frustrated by the refusal of poems to explain themselves. I wonder if it's because something is missing in me, or if I have failed to find a particular key to unlock meaning. And then I wonder if I have lost my way for demanding meaning at all.

I do not fully understand Unforced Error by Meghan O'Rourke except to recognise a sense that an endless childhood summer is finite after all. Sooner or later, you're serving snacks to some businessman, sooner or later you're finished altogether. And there's a reckoning of sorts.

As bleak as that sounds, I still think the whole is shot through with the summer, both finite and unending, and that's something that matters.

Once: those long wet Vermont summers.
No money, nothing to do but read books, swim
in the river with men wearing their jean shorts,
then play bingo outside the church, celebrating when we won.
Nothing seemed real to me and it was all very alive.

With a murder this week and the ends to which it will be put by bad people; with a funeral too; I guess it's no surprise that my thoughts turn a little melancholy.

Reading this poem, Dear Robert, I by Pierre Joris, I think about how, in present routine, we turn to the past -- how we're always in conversation with it. The poet's Robert may have been alive ('right after sending this off to you'), but he is absent and formative. Anyway, we all write letters to the dead. I like the sense of safety and the everyday as the poet settles to his work, and the abstract but real understanding that the elemental stands ready to impose itself eventually.

I read the poem at my desk in the morning before anyone else was awake in my house. I recognised that balance.

...I put cups on
desk, pour first coffee, turn
to look out at white-
capped waves — nothing
melvillian, just normal fall
adjustment — can’t yet see the anchored ships,
the leaves still all on the trees
in the Narrows Botanical Garden
across Shore Road,
wind tires or tortures them or tries to,
at least shakes them without spearing them so
a big white incongruous light shines through every
so often all the way from Staten Island

Finally, a satirical article prompted by the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel published this week. This is A Beautiful Day for Saying Nothing by Alexandra Petri and it's not a poem. Except maybe it is. I added the line breaks in this extract, because that's how I read it. Apologies to the author.

There has never been a pretext even once.
We certainly don’t know what you mean.
Just be quiet.
Don’t say We have to speak up now,
because there will always be an excuse
when the troops descend on the city
or the strike hits the boat
or the vans roll up and start
shoving people inside.

I’m sorry I said excuse.
I’m sorry I said pretext.
I should have said reason.
I should have said nothing.