Ariel by Sylvia Plath

1)      What was your impression of the collection as a whole? Have you read it before/studied it? Did your impressions change or opinions differ on re-reading? Did you gain any new insights?

2)      How do you feel Plath depicts motherhood (in poems like “Morning Star”). Do you think she sees it as a positive or negative experience?

3)      Do you feel that the content and themes of these poems bears any relation or relevance to life today?

4)      Did you notice any particular images of the “feminine” in the poems - mythological women or women from history for instance? Robert Lowell stated that, in these poems, "almost everything we customarily think of as feminine is turned on its head"? Do you agree with this?

5)      Is it possible to read the collection without being influenced by what we know of Plath’s life and death? Or is this an integral part of understanding the collection?

6)      Death is a defining presence in the collection - in what guises does death appear?

Is death counter-balanced in any way with images of birth, rebirth or renewal?

7)      There are numerous allusions to Nazi brutality and the Holocaust, in "Lady Lazarus" and some other poems, are these justified? What do you think is their purpose?

8)      Is there a single poem that you think embodies Plaths’ poetic voice more than any other?

9)      Did you have a favourite/least favourite poem? Why?

10)  Images of illness, disintegration appear frequently within the collection - what is the overall effect of this? What impression does it give?

11)  Daddy is a character that appears several times in this collection - what do you think was Plath’s relationship to her father? Hughes said in “Birthday Letters” that "a god / That was not your [Plath's] father / Was a false god." Do you agree with this?

12)  Plath writes often about nature and the elements - do you think these poems are effective? Do they fit with her other themes?

Fiere by Jackie Kay

1)      Fiere was written as a companion piece or counterpart to Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road, do you think you needed to know this? Did it work as a stand-alone collection?

2)      Many of the poems in the collection are about her experiences of finding her birth parents – did you feel any emotional connection with the writer and her quest?

3)      The two major themes of this collection are friendship and connectedness – how did you feel that the author handled these themes? Did you feel any sense of recognition or affinity to the poems and the way that these subjects were addressed? Did these poems ring true?

4)      What was your overall impression of the collection as a whole? Did you like/dislike it? Why?

5)      Did you understand the Scot’s dialect used in some of the poems?

6)      Did you use the glossary at the back of the book whilst reading or look at it afterwards? Did using the glossary effect your enjoyment of the book? Would you have preferred these definitions as footnotes?

7)      What do you think was the reason for putting the glossary at the back?

8)      What did you think of Kay’s use of rhyme? Did you notice it?

9)      Did you notice any particular use of poetic forms?

10)  What was your opinion of the Fiere sequence? Why do you think the poems were spread out rather than all together? Did this work or would they have been better together? Why?

Birthday Letters – Ted Hughes

1)      The poems in the collection are in chronological order (the order that events happened) as opposed to the order in which Hughes might have written them. What effect does this ordering have on the collection? Does it enrich the experience in any way? Does it make sense?

2)      Who is the subject of these poems? Did it feel like they were all about the same person?

3)      What sense did you get about the “I”, the narrator of the poems? How did you feel about him? Did you like him/dislike him? Did he feel real/human? Did you feel sympathy for him? What were his failings?

4)      What was the overall tone of the book? How did it make you feel? Was the tone too light, too heavy or about right?

5)      How did the writing make you feel about the person they were about? Did you think she was treated fairly/unfairly? Did you feel differently about her by the end?

6)      Were you able to separate the collection from what you already knew about Plath and Hughes and their relationship? Does the collection work without prior knowledge of what happened?

7)      Hughes uses language and references to Plath’s language and poetry throughout the collection (moon, Yew tree etc.) Did you need to know this? Does prior knowledge of Plath’s work add extra depth to the work or did you find the reference annoying?

8)      It feels like almost every poem in the collection is coloured by the death to come – how did you feel about this? Were the many references to death to heavy, jarring? Did you want less of them or more? Do you think that in light of what happened that Hughes was reading too much into everyday occurrence and behaviour – imbuing them with some deeper significance that might not have been there?

9)      Hughes makes many references to Plath’s Americanness (“Fulbright Scholars,” “Your Paris,” “Stubbing  Wharfe”), what significance do you think he attaches to it? How does it contrast with his Englishness?  Do the poems set in America differ from the ones set in Europe?

10)  How does Hughes use animals within the collection? (“Sam,” “The Owl,” “The Chipmunk,” “9 Willow Street,” “The 59th Bear,” “Epiphany,” “The Rabbit Catcher,” “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother”).  What do the different animals symbolise?

11)  Did you notice the allusions to any other writers in the poems?  Donne  (“18 Rugby Street), ”Shakespeare (“A Pink Wool Knitted Dress,”  “Setebos”)  Chaucer  (“St. Botolph’s,” “Chaucer”)  and Emily Brontë  (“Wuthering Heights”) as well as to Plath’s own poems. What function do these references serve?  Does knowing the work s alluded to deepen your understanding of these poems in any way? Does it make Hughes’s poems any more or less accessible?

12)  Hughes makes reference to oracles and portents in several of the poems (e.g. Ouija board, horoscopes etc). What purpose (if any) are these serving in the narrative?

13)  Does Hughes intimate that what happened to Plath was unavoidable? Did you feel like he took any responsibility?

14)  What was your overall feeling about the collection? Did you like or dislike it? Why?

15)  What was your favourite/ least favourite poem? Why?   

The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

1)      What was the overall tone/mood of the collection?

2)      Thinking about the title poem “The Whitsun Weddings” – who is the speaker in the poem? What is your impression of the speaker? How would you describe his attitude to what he sees? Did the layout and the stanza breaks add anything to your reading of the poem?

3)      What function do you think Mr Bleaney performs in the poem Mr Bleaney?

4)      What impression did you get of Larkin’s views of humanity? Marriage?

5)      What was your favourite/least favourite poem? Why?

6)      Did you notice anything about the forms of the poems or the rhyme schemes?

7)      How did you feel about Larkin’s use of language?

8)      What do you think Larkin was trying to achieve in the poem about the shop “The Large Cool Store”? Are the shop and the clothes it sells analogies for something else?

9)      Did you notice any pre-occupations or emerging themes within the collection?

10)  Poems like “The Whitsun weddings” and “Nothing to be Said” give a sense of changing ways of life and the passing of time, how life ultimately leads to death – do you think Larkin does this effectively? Are lines like “Life is a slow dying” too melodramatic?

11)  Does the collection give away anything about the writer’s state of mind?

12)  Did you enjoy the collection as a whole? What did you particularly like/dislike about it? Did the order of poems work for you? 

13)  Larkin is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century – would you agree with this? Why?

The Water Table by Philip Gross

1.      Gross lays many of the poems out in unusual or irregular form (e.g. Amphora and The grounds). Did you understand why he chose each particular form? Do you think these poems are successful? Did you think that it worked better for some poems than others? Which (if any) did you think were more/less successful?

2.      Who or what did you think First Dog was in the poem First Things?

3.      The poem To Build a Bridge is a villanelle; did you notice any other traditional forms amongst the poems? Why do you think Gross chose a villanelle for this particular subject matter?

4.      There is a sequence called Betweenland that is spread out through the book – would you have  rather seen these poems together or do you think they work better spread out? Did you enjoy the sequence?Why? What was the gist of the sequence? Did you understand why the poems were connected?

5.      Gross often mixes the colloquial with the scientific e.g. "we've punched clean into heaven: snow- // dazzle plains of stratocumulus around us, the paleo-arctic…(Ice Man Dreaming); do you think this works? Did you like it?

6.      The Water Table won the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize in 2009, do you think it was a good choice? Why?

Glossary

Jeremy Hooker  (Stilt City) – an English poet who lived for eleven years in Wales.

Amphora - An amphora (plural: amphorae or amphoras) is a type of vase-shaped ceramic container with two handles and a long neck narrower than the body. 

Visigoth (The Presence) - A member of the western Goths that invaded the Roman Empire in the fourth century a.d. and settled in France and Spain.

Gillian Clarke (Globe) – a Welsh poet and playwright.

The Rosetta Stone (Thinks Bubble) – an ancient Egytian piece of granite inscribed with words in two languages – Egyptian and Greek.

Petroglyphs – rock engravings.

The Cinder Path – Andrew Motion

1) Some of the poems in this collection are very conversational in tone – almost prosy – what effect does this have? Did you like it?
2) In some of the poems Motion uses very long lines, does this work? Did you like dislike it? Why?
3) Motion makes direct allusion (by name) to other poets (ie Robert Frost, Rupert Brooke) and he also echoes other poets like Andrew Marvell in poems like The Mower – did these poems work? Do you think footnotes or endnotes might have been beneficial or do they stand alone successfully?
4) There is an epigraph at the beginning of the book taken from Cinkante Balades by John Gower – why do you think there was no translation of this? Did you want one?
5) The last part of the book is made up of elegies to Motion’s father. How did you feel about these poems? Did you like them? Did they fit in with the general tone of the collection?
6) Did you notice anything about the form of the poems?
7) Did you notice any rhyme schemes? How did they work with the subject matter?
8) How did you feel about the group of sonnets about Harry Patch? Did they fit the subject matter? Would you have liked to know more about Harry Patch?
9) It has been said that some of these poems sound like poems written by a poet laureate – that they were written specifically to mention particular people or places. Did you notice this? Does it matter?

Rapture - Carol Ann Duffy

1. "Rapture" is a collection of love poems - what was your overall feeling about the collection? Did you enjoy it/dislike it? Why?
2. How did you feel about the two main characters (the writer and the addressee)?
3. What was the relationship like? Did it seem healthy/dysfunctional? Why?
4. How did you feel about the use of rhyme within the collection?
5. Duffy uses a lot of old fashioned and 'poetic' words in these poems (i.e. grace, pardon, gold) and these words crop up several different poems. What do you think Duffy was trying to achieve by using this type of  language? Does it work?
6. Did you have a favourite/least favourite poem? Why?
7. What do you think of Duffy's use of form in this collection - for example there are quite a few sonnets, does the form fit the subject matter? What did you think about the way that the poems were laid out on the page?
8. What was the cumulative effect of the collection on the reader? Is it too much/just right? How did it make you feel? 
9. Could you relate to the sentiments conveyed?
10. Did this book make you more likely/less likely to read another collection by the same author?
11. Carol Ann Duffy is the poet laureate, did this collection have any bearing on your feelings about that?