Four paintings by Kiri Piahana-Wong

I saw Alice Oswald reading at the 'Shifting Territories' conference last week and the way she memorises her own work and performs it completely knocked me out.  Her poetry had never really 'come off the page' for me before, but now I realise how oral it is - written to be spoken aloud.  She also plays with silence - leaving long gaps in the poems for the words to resonate.  She's working in the old bardic tradition, rather than the modern performance poetry genre, and it's very interesting.  I couldn't find a film on YouTube of her reading her own work (only part of 'Rockaby' by Samuel Beckett) but I did find this clip of Andrew Motion reading her sonnet 'Wedding' and explaining why he thinks it's great contemporary literature.
Click here for the link if the video won't run.

Please hop over to the Tuesday Poem hub for some more, very different, Tuesday Poetry!  This week the hub poem is

Four paintings by Kiri Piahana-Wong

And it begins like this - 
 

In the morning
the light touches the walls
like a painting
the morning sun falling in thin brushstrokes
her hair a dark tangle
his face blurred with sleep . . . . . . .