Don't Bring Me No Rocking Chair

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Gathering poems from Shakespeare to the present, Don't Bring Me No Rocking Chair addresses ageing through the several ages of poetry. Now more than ever, as more of us live for longer, the idea of what it means to age or to grow old engages and concerns people of all ages. One of the problems of ageing is the language we use to define it and the list of pejoratives associated with it, with attitudes to ageing ranging from 'fatalism, denial, negative stereotyping and tunnel vision to fantasy' (Professor Tom Kirkwood, Newcastle University). Poetry can help to give us a fresh language to think about ageing and these poems are chosen to fortify, celebrate, lament, grieve, rage and ridicule. There is not one way to age but neither can any of us truly stop our bodies from ageing. Ageing is not a single phenomenon but complex, multiple, perplexing: experienced historically as well as individually. This anthology may not console but it can widen our perspectives, helping us to change what we can change: our attitudes. This anthology was prepared for the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts as part of the Societal Challenge Theme on Ageing at Newcastle University with support from the Institute of Ageing and Health, Newcastle University, and has a foreword by Joan Bakewell.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword (p. 11)
• Introduction (p. 12)
• 1 Ancient and Modern
• 'I am a jolly foster': Anonymous (p. 22)
• 'I have been a foster...': Anonymous (p. 23)
• Even such is Time (p. 23)
• Pluck the Fruit and Taste the Pleasure (p. 24)
• Sephestia's Song to her Child (p. 25)
• from Macbeth ('Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...') (p. 26)
• Sonnet XVIH (p. 26)
• Sonnet XLX (p. 27)
• Sonnet LXXIII (p. 27)
• from Cymbeline ('Fear no more the heat o' the sun...') (p. 28)
• from As You Like It ('All the world's a stage...) (p. 29)
• To Celia (p. 30)
• The Good Morrow (p. 30)
• The Sun Rising (p. 31)
• 'Death be not proud' (p. 32)
• Song (p. 33)
• On Himself (p. 33)
• To a Gentlewoman, objecting to him his grey hairs (p. 34)
• The parting verse, the feast there ended. (p. 34)
• To the Virgins, to make much of Time (p. 35)
• To Daffodils (p. 35)
• Sic Vita (p. 36)
• Virtue (p. 37)
• How Soon Hath Time (p. 37)
• On Time (p. 38)
• On the University Carrier (p. 39)
• To Chloe, Who Wished Herself Young Enough For Me (p. 40)
• To His Coy Mistress (p. 41)
• Wit and Wisdom (p. 42)
• A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover (p. 43)
• On a Fly Drinking Out of His Cup (p. 44)
• On the Death of Dr Robert Levet (p. 44)
• 'Epitaph on Mrs Clerke' (p. 46)
• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (p. 46)
• Song from The Duenna (p. 48)
• The Echoing Green (p. 49)
• The Angel (p. 50)
• Sound, Sound the Clarion (p. 50)
• The Old Familiar Faces (p. 51)
• On His Seventy-fifth Birthday (p. 52)
• Jenny Kiss'd Me (p. 52)
• 2 Individual / Body
• Anodyne (p. 55)
• poem to my uterus (p. 56)
• I Look into My Glass (p. 57)
• The Face in the Mirror (p. 57)
• Old Man Leaves Party (p. 58)
• Face Lift (p. 59)
• On Going Deaf (p. 60)
• from Hair (p. 60)
• Hairless (p. 61)
• Cancer Winter (p. 62)
• Here (p. 63)
• Sixty Years After (p. 63)
• The 90th Year (p. 64)
• During the Eclipse (p. 65)
• Workhorse (p. 66)
• Finale (p. 67)
• His Diagnosis (p. 67)
• Naked Vision (p. 68)
• About Time (p. 69)
• Maura (p. 69)
• Thirtieth (p. 70)
• Should You Die First (p. 71)
• Child Burial (p. 72)
• Somewhat Unravelled (p. 73)
• Bearhugs (p. 74)
• Climbing My Grandfather (p. 75)
• Wheesht, Wheesht (p. 76)
• In the Hospital, Near the End (p. 76)
• On Aging (p. 78)
• 3 Mind/Social
• Father William (p. 82)
• Things (p. 83)
• Poem for a Birthday (p. 83)
• from King Lear ('Pray do not mock me') (p. 84)
• His Old Approach (p. 85)
• Piano (p. 85)
• Hospital Evening (p. 86)
• Memoirs (p. 87)
• The Other House (p. 88)
• The Tune the Old Cow Died of (p. 90)
• City (p. 91)
• Fast Forward (p. 92)
• Ranunculus Which My Father Called a Poppy (p. 93)
• The Explosion (p. 94)
• How Lies Grow (p. 95)
• My Children (p. 95)
• Indian Cooking (p. 96)
• Mama Dot (p. 96)
• Names (p. 97)
• Politics (p. 98)
• The Emigrant Irish (p. 98)
• from I Am Waiting (p. 99)
• Age (p. 100)
• Of all those starting out (p. 103)
• Heredity (p. 103)
• 'I Stepped from Plank to Plank' (p. 104)
• A Consumer's Report (p. 104)
• Why Should Not Old Men be Mad? (p. 106)
• What the Doctor Said (p. 107)
• Naima (p. 108)
• Sonnet LXXXVUI: A Final Sonnet (p. 108)
• I Held a Shelley Manuscript (p. 109)
• J.P. Donleavy's Dublin (p. 110)
• Dress Rehearsals (p. 110)
• Day Trip (p. 111)
• Late Show (p. 112)
• When I Grow Up (p. 113)
• The Old Fools (p. 114)
• A 14-Year-Old Convalescent Cat in the Winter (p. 116)
• Swineherd (p. 116)
• Love in a Bathtub (p. 117)
• The May Tree (p. 118)
• How to Behave With the 111 (p. 119)
• Visiting Stanley Kunitz (p. 120)
• France (p. 121)
• Elegy (p. 121)
• Water (p. 124)
• 4 Spirit/Archetypal
• from East Coker (p. 128)
• Into Rail (p. 129)
• from A Shropshire Lad (p. 129)
• London Bells (p. 130)
• Her Greatest Love (p. 131)
• An Observation (p. 131)
• At Eighty (p. 132)
• Late Ripeness (p. 133)
• Ninetieth Birthday (p. 134)
• Grandfather (p. 135)
• To Waken an Old Lady (p. 135)
• Beautiful Old Age (p. 136)
• Sailing to Byzantium (p. 137)
• from Ode on a Grecian Urn (p. 138)
• Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night (p. 139)
• Let Me Die A Youngman's Death (p. 140)
• The Revisit (p. 141)
• Strawberry Meringue (p. 142)
• Defying Gravity (p. 143)
• The Last Days of the Comeback Kid (p. 144)
• from Findings (p. 145)
• The Reassurance (p. 145)
• The Presence (p. 146)
• I Remember, I Remember (p. 147)
• Four Ducks on a Pond (p. 148)
• Handbag (p. 148)
• from A Shropshire Lad (p. 149)
• Funeral Blues (p. 149)
• In the Waiting Room (p. 150)
• from The Ship of Death (p. 151)
• Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam (p. 152)
• Charon (p. 152)
• from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (p. 153)
• John Anderson, my jo
• Fiere (p. 155)
• When You Are Old (p. 156)
• A Different Kind of Dark (p. 156)
• The Trees (p. 157)
• The Condom Tree (p. 157)
• Everything Changes (p. 158)
• Variation and Reflection on a Theme by Rilke (p. 159)
• poem in praise of menstruation (p. 160)
• Primary Wonder (p. 161)
• Heaven To Be (p. 162)
• When I Woke, Everything Was the Same, but Different (p. 163)
• Swan in Falling Snow (p. 163)
• from Abide with Me (p. 164)
• Max (p. 164)
• Everything Is Going To Be All Right (p. 165)
• Train Ride (p. 166)
• A Call (p. 167)
• from In the Village (p. 167)
• The Present (p. 168)
• Going Without Saying (p. 169)
• Snow (p. 169)
• from Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons: The Last Lesson (p. 170)
• Scintillate (p. 170)
• Crossing the Bar (p. 171)
• Skald's Death (p. 172)
• Late Fragment (p. 172)
• 5 Older Poets
• The Railway Children (p. 174)
• Lunch (p. 174)
• The Old Gods (p. 175)
• At Brute Point (p. 176)
• Swimming in the Flood (p. 178)
• Miracle (p. 179)
• Blue Hydrangeas (p. 179)
• Fanfare (p. 180)
• On Hearing I'd Outlived My Son the Linguist (p. 182)
• Lullaby (p. 182)
• Old Flame (p. 183)
• Mrs Baldwin (p. 184)
• Not for Me a Youngman's Death (p. 185)
• Ageing (p. 186)
• A Patient Old Cripple (p. 187)
• Sea Canes (p. 188)
• Longlife (p. 189)
• What I Regret (p. 189)
• Lives (p. 190)
• In the Attic (p. 192)
• Acknowledgements (p. 195)
• Index of Poets (p. 199)
• Index of Titles and First Lines (p. 201)