Lifesaving Lines

A new series of blog posts featuring favourite lines of poetry:

I haven’t had time to stand and fart recently, from Struggling, by Mark Robinson

The dead streetlamp, from Why We Must Write, by Mark Halliday

Awful but cheerful, from The Bight, by Elizabeth Bishop

Badly-lit, from The Gift, by Brendan Kennelly

Past fifty, from For Sheridan, by Robert Lowell

Do your own work, from Fosterage, by Seamus Heaney

Humpback of the week, from Poem for Wednesday, by Naomi Jaffa

You’ve got to eat, from The Day After, by Michael Laskey

A helping grain of sand, from Alone, by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Roger Fulton

The black panes, from Autumn, by Roo Borson

We all matter, from Indelible, Miraculous, by Julia Darling

It’s winter again / I am living, from What the Living Do, by Marie Howe

Twist and reek, from Stone, I Presume, by Ian McMillan

The things themselves, from The Death of Fred Clifton, by Lucille Clifton

And is it stamina, from The Bluet, by James Schuyler

When weeds, in wheels, from Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Her blacks crackle and drag, from Edge, by Sylvia Plath

Like something almost being said, from The Trees, by Philip Larkin

So patient in the machinery of heaven, from An October Salmon, by Ted Hughes

What it showed in school, from “Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity…”, by Gwendolyn Brooks

The city is fantastic, from History, by Tomaž Šalamun, translated by Tomaž Šalamun and Bob Perleman

The job of the long black hearse, from The Job of Paradise, by Roger Robinson

This poem is not about Pobbles, from Pobble, by Heather Trickey