I guess a thread with this title could go on forever, but I’ve been meaning to mention a poet I started a thread about a few years back, the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins—in my opinion, greatly underappreciated.

Here’s another one by him, in addition to the ones on that thread. It’s from his collection Fidelities (1968), although I’m copying it from his Collected Poems (Golgonooza Press, 1986):


Rebirth

Just as the will to power
From youth exhausted spins
To earth, it sees a flower
Rooted in ruins.
From that remaking hour
Perception begins.

This for which I care,
By the crowd denied,
Holds a truth so clear,
By none identified.
I would expound it here,
But my tongue is tied.

Dearest things are so:
Neglected, they stay;
Applauded, they go.
The river runs away
And we check its flow
Only when we play.

Strange, that in all we make
A solemn purpose can,
More than most things, break,
While some lesser plan
By accident will wake
The deepest roots in man.

My vote would be for the late Scottish poet George MacBeth. (But steer clear of his novels; they're dreadful.) Once a major figure on the British poetry scene, it's a shame he's not more read these days. Here is "The God of Love":

The God of Love

The musk-ox is accustomed to near-Arctic conditions. When danger threatens, these beasts cluster together to form a defensive wall, or a "porcupine", with the calves in the middle.
– Dr Wolfgang Engelhart

I found them between far hills, by a frozen lake.
On a patch of bare ground. They were grouped
In a solid ring, like an ark of horn. And around
Them circled, slowly closing in,
Their tongues lolling, their ears flattened against the wind,

A whirlpool of wolves. As I breathed, one fragment of bone and
Muscle detached itself from the mass and
Plunged. The pad of the pack slackened, as if
A brooch had been loosened. But when the bull
Returned to the herd, the revolving collar was tighter. And only

The windward owl, uplifted on white wings
In the glass of air, alert for her young,
Soared high enough to look into the cleared centre
And grasp the cause. To the slow brain
Of each beast by the frozen lake what lay in the cradle of their crowned

Heads of horn was a sort of god-head. Its brows
Nudged when the arc was formed. Its need
Was a delicate womb away from the iron collar
Of death, a cave in the ring of horn
Their encircling flesh had backed with fur. That the collar of death

Was the bone of their own skulls: that a softer womb
Would open between far hills in a plunge
Of bunched muscles: and that their immortal calf lay
Dead on the snow with its horns dug into
The ice for grass: they neither saw nor felt. And yet if

That hill of fur could split and run – like a river
Of ice in thaw, like a broken grave –
It would crack across the icy crust of withdrawn
Sustenance and the rigid circle
Of death be shivered: the fed herd would entail its under-fur

On the swell of a soft hill and the future be sown
On grass, I thought. But the herd fell
By the bank of the lake on the plain, and the pack closed,
And the ice remained. And I saw that the god
In their ark of horn was a god of love, who made them die.

Thanks, Andrew, for posting this one by George Macbeth. I remember this very clearly from school-days, way back in the seventies - as I remember his anthology, which we studied for A-level. It was a very good anthology - at least as I remember it. And you're right, he does seem to have disappeared from the scene. I have just Googled him and he has an unbelievably long list of titles to his name - including a great many of those novels you warn us against. I also discovered this quite interesting presentation of this poem in The Guardian by Carol Rumens - who also plays quite an active part in the discussion that follows.

I used the word "remember" a lot in my remarks above. It's because reading this poem again brought back to mind how much I liked this poem at the time, although I had almost entirely forgotten it in the intervening years (if that makes any sense).

Anyway, here's another one of his which I haven't thought of for many years but which now comes back to mind. I must now seek out a Selected Poems of his (I imagine the Collected would be a rather intimidating volume).