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I have become involved with a Thomas Hardy Society poetry group which meets once a month to read and share a variety of poems by poets on a theme or topic as proposed in advance for each meeting.
As there are some excellent readers who find great poems, whether by Hardy or by others, it is always a pleasure to listen, to discover or rediscover poems.
What poems would you want to take with you if marooned on a desert island? The rules of the game were loosely suggested by the example of Desert Island discs.
Obviously it wouldn't be possible to read a long poem at such a meeting, but given the chance I would take a long epic to occupy my time in isolation or exile on an island:
Milton's Paradise Lost, Homer's Odyssey for starters.
Or amusing long poems like Byron's Don Juan.
If allowed a sequence of poems, I'd take George Seferis' Mythistorima, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Eliot's Four Quartets, Blake's Songs of Experience, Hardy's Poems 1912-1913, William Barnes' Poems in the Dorset Dialect, Edwin Muir's The Labyrinth collection. That would probably be cheating.
In terms of shorter single poems, I'd probably take Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, Donne's Sweetest Love, I do not go, Hardy's Beeny Cliff, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Eliot's East Coker, Eva Strom's The Outer Hebrides.
Ask me in a few weeks, and I'd probably come up with another list.
Sadly, I missed the meeting as my car battery was dead. The AA came eventually, and I had to buy a new battery.
