TUESDAY POEM THIS WEEK EXPLORES THE MYTHIC AND THE QUOTIDIAN

An Irish feminist poet is at the Tuesday Poem hub this week with a powerful poem that combines the mythical and the quotidian to explore marital love and its lost intensity - meet Eavan Boland and her poem Love selected by Tuesday Poet from Tipperary John Griffin. Then click on the live blog roll for more of the mythical, more of the quotidian, more explorations of the stuff that makes up both the epic and the intimate, the intense and the mundane in our lives... in other words POETRY.
As usual, in amongst the posts by the 30 Tuesday Poets there are inevitable conversations between the poems - Vana Manasiadis' poem Penelope the Mythic combines myth and plain speaking as Boland does, Jennifer Compton writes about marital love without myth but with the same focus Boland has on the intense feelings at love's beginnings, Helen Rickerby's and Rhian Gallagher's poems write simply of the contentment in love, John Donne is posted twice in two different blogs - and one of the poems is surely one of the most powerful ever about lifelong love and its absence, Harvey McQueen's poem Thomas Hardy is a poet near the end of his life talking of the joy and privilege of 'noticing' - a recognition of those intense moments that uplift an ordinary life, Gaelic poet Anthony Raftery who lived over 150 years ago writes of much the same thing - in English and Gaelic - a good life and the end in sight.
US poet Eileen Moeller envies the stuff of contentment in her poem and NZer Saradha Koirala 'notices' the difference between the contented and the discontented.
Then there are poems that break out into different spheres entirely - award-winning Selina Tusitala Marsh can be heard reading a poem that lays into the likes of Gauguin for creating the sexualised maidens of the 'South Pacific paradise', there's a haiku in three languages on the way human-beings deplete nature and a poem by Charles Causley on the loss of an oil tanker, finally there are two poems on astronauts by Janis Freegard and Harvey Molloy that remind the reader how small our planet really is both physically and in its concerns, and (in the same spirit as Boland's poem) how short our moments of glory. One moment we are up among the stars, the next we are back home painting with moondust. Read and be amazed.