Poster poems: glass | Poetry

Poster poems: glass

Both fragile and strong, a mirror and a container – glass shares many properties with good poetry. Share your cracking verse here

Like so many everyday items we take for granted, glass originated in the Middle East. The earliest known manufactured glass objects are from Mesopotamia, and were made about 5,000 years ago. For most of the intervening period, glass was a luxury item, used for jewellery and expensive tableware. It must have seemed somewhat miraculous: a transparent, malleable, yet rigid substance, something between rock, water and air. Of course, these very properties have made glass a rich source of imagery for poets.

Glassblowing is an ancient art, as reflected in this Greek poem found on a third century Egyptian scroll that reflects the quasi-divine nature of the material. For a more recent glassblowing poet, Peter Goldsworthy, the glassblower’s deft, precarious and delicate operations form a mirror of the poet’s craft in Glass. Goldsworthy’s poem comes to rest on a pun on the word “still”; the blower forms a vessel of that name, but the timeless stillness of the best glassware is also present. Exploring similar territory, Thomas W Shapcott’s The Glass Vase stands outside time and place, and its great value is that it is breakable, that it stands for the fragility of “the thing made”, which is life itself.

For Robert Pinsky, the parallel between glass – “a liquid / Sagging over centuries” – and water opens up the history of his family and his own role in it. The link comes to a focus in the work of his father, an optician who cut lenses on a water-cooled wheel. Glass and memory become fused in an image of delicate durability.

Looking at a square of burning red on his wall, produced by evening light through a window, Charles Tomlinson is drawn to the realisation that glass has an inner structure like a grain in wood in Glass Grain. The effect of this uneven quality on the light that passes through the window panes has, in his mind, a fugal quality of subject and response, repeating and overlapping, constantly returning to the image through the glass.

A glass-bottom boat is a very particular kind of window, one that opens on to a world as alien as space and offers us, as in Elizabeth Spires’s poem of that name, an opportunity not only to observe, but to reflect on what that alien space can tell us about our human sphere. It’s as if the composite nature of glass, both solid and permeable to light, makes it the perfect interface between worlds.

The speaker in Kate Llewellyn’s Glass picks up a piece of broken glass – a heart-shaped fragment of the bottom of a bottle. This cold, sharp-edged heart becomes something to hold on to in the midst of a shattered world.

Amy Clampitt is also concerned with broken fragments in her poem Beach Glass, as she gathers broken fragments of what were containers for consumer products, tossed and washed up by the sea. These shards are in the process of returning to their silicate origins as grains of sand, a process that reflects human culture on a microcosmic scale. Glass may be fragile, but the elements that constitute it endure and transform on geological timescales that dwarf our made world.

And so, this month’s challenge is to write poems on the subject of glass. Fragile and strong, clear or translucent, container or mirror, shaped by little more than a puff of breath, glass shares many of the properties of a good poem. What does it mean to you?

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