Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

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The calculator uses Zeller’s Algorithm, which can determine the day of the week for any date in the past, present or future, for any dates between 1582 and 4902. Simple enter your date of birth, and the day of the week in which you were born will appear. Coventry is a realist, for all the heartfulness and sexiness in her poems, and often at her strongest when she confronts the harsher disappointments time delivers: death, family illness, change. She can deal with these subjects both directly and obliquely. On the Death of an Absent Father spells out the gap between the promise of the title and the actual contents. No father, no death, greets the reader. But the demolished hotel and the memories it evokes summon up the more significant loss.

The speaker for Spontaneity begins. Perhaps he’s invoking the famous letter from John Keats to John Taylor (1818) in which the young poet announced his view that “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”.This week’s poem, recalling the experience of wild camping on Dartmoor, was Sean Borodale’s response on 13 January to a local landowner case against the use of the moorland for this purpose. In a prose-note to the poem, Borodale wrote: “Wild camping is a frail, frayed remnant of deeper engagement, and the writing of this poem is an appeal against the belief that powerful landscapes are only for the wealthy, to be reserved for specific kinds of recreation – hunting, shooting – or as passing photo opportunities.” To promote the vital role that poetry plays in all our lives – poetry has the power to bring people and communities together We are an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. Our sponsors and supporters include: Bookmark (formerly Forward Worldwide), the late Felix Dennis, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the John Ellerman Foundation. We're grateful to these organisations for supporting our work.

Reviewing The Marble Bed in the East Hampton Star, Julie Sheehan pointed out that the poems also represent a “quarrel” with Dante. Schulman may sometimes organise her poem into tercets, but she doesn’t write terza rima, and rarely uses end-rhyme. There’s also a more flexible syllable count than that of Dante’s hendecasyllabic line: Schulman often interleaves 12- and 11-syllable lines, as in Because. Beyond this formal level, Schulman also challenges Dante’s cosmology, the tripartite universe of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso in the Divine Comedy. Schulman’s contemporary urban settings are closer to those of Montale, memory-haunted, tangled, impure. Heaven and hell are twisted together inextricably. Because is a poem that emphasises and even honours this condition.At first glance, the poem looks formal. It might be a 20th-century Elizabethan song, with verses cut to a regular length. Only they’re not: the first verse has seven lines, the second eight, the third nine – two odd numbers bookending an even one. It’s as if even at the most basic level of form, there’d been a decision both to reflect stasis – the immutable “lunar beauty”– and the movement of time. In the crucial line in verse two, “time is inches”, and one might add that time is also the pulse of the poem, the dimeter rhythm carrying the thought from line to line, the sonic pattern of assertions and echoes.

National Poetry Day celebrations have got bigger and bigger each year, with more and more people joining in. That the birds’ hunger has been aroused is suggested by their “making a moan” – they’re not simply making a noise, but are disturbed and excited. When the alpha crow sets out the plan, the other bird, notably, doesn’t argue. The two are a couple, with a nest to furnish. If the male bird is lording it over the hen, the hen doesn’t complain. There is a popular contemporary Christian song by Curtis Chapman called “Tuesday’s Child”. In this song, he interprets the meaning of Tuesday’s Child’s as having a strong faith in God. More than half of children and young people surveyed (54%) told us they do not currently engage with poetry. The National Literacy Trust (2018)Sunday is the traditional Sabbath Day, so it makes sense that a child born on this day is thought to be fortunate and happy. A child born on Sunday is thought to be blessed with positive traits. A “Book of Hours’” depicting “turrets”, “red-thorn bowers” and “ladies in bright tissue” – can such images really belong to a poem by DH Lawrence? Grey Evening first appeared in the 1916 collection, Amores. Some of the pieces in his first collection, Love Poems and Others (1912), are less concerned with static images, more freely constructed. In many ways Grey Evening a traditional love lyric. At times, its lapidary quality reflects the medieval Book of Hours which provides its central metaphor. Wednesday Addams from the Addams Family is a modern example of this archetype, and some children’s charities are inspired by this interpretation of “Wednesday’s Child”.