poets curdle words until they bite
This is just to let you know that I have had a little go at simplifying and improving this website. The blog works just as it always did and still gives you new poems and a searchable archive of all the old ones, together with recordings of them all. You can now use the tabs above to navigate to the Books, Events and Home pages which have all been updated. There is a new page (also clickable on the tabs above called ‘Interviews‘ which gathers in one place links to various interviews I have given about my work, life and faith, particularly to the sequence of interviews on Lancia Smith’s excellent website Cultivating The True The Good and the Beautiful.
The other new thing is that I now have a dedicated email address for any enquiries about readings, lectures or performances, which is malcolmguite@gmail.com and can be found permanently on the Home Page. I hope these simplifications and improvements will be helpful.
In other news, here is a poem about cheese (and poetry)! As usual you can hear the poem by clicking on the title or the ‘play’ button.
‘The Poets Have Been Mysteriously Silent About Cheese’ GK Chesterton
Poets have been silent about cheese
Because whilst every subject is the message,
Cheese is the very medium of their work.
We drink in language with our mothers milk,
But poets curdle words until they bite,
With substance and a flavour of their own:
So Donne is sharp and Geoffrey Hill is sour,
Larkin ascerbic, Tennyson has power
(But only taken late at night with port.)
,I like them all and sample every sort
From creamy Keats with his ‘mossed cottage trees’,
Tasting the words themselves like cottage cheese,
To Eliot, difficult, in cold collations,
Crumbling, and stuffed with other folk’s quotations.
Malcolm Guite 
I love it, Malcolm – the poem, that is! It has made me chuckle this afternoon in the midst of doing my accounts, which has to be a good thing.
I LOVE this poem! My partner wrote a poem about Wensleydale and if he reads it, he always quotes Chesterton first: https://52poemsinayear.wordpress.com/2015/03/29/in-praise-of-wensleydale/
Excellent. Why not post the Wensleydale poem here!
How kind of you! I will ask him. 🙂
At last, the mystery explained!
In response to Malcolm’s kind invitation, here is a poem by my partner, Julian Dobson, indicating that not ALL poets have been silent on the subject of cheese!
IN PRAISE OF WENSLEYDALE
It’s a sweetness that can only rise from limestone
it’s the sharpness of a certain kind of grass
it’s a flying spark from horseshoe or from grindstone
the imprint of a tractor’s tyres at dusk
It’s a snorting Friesian’s udder at the milking
the reversing of a tanker in a yard
it’s water stained by soil and shot like satin
the first frost glinting in the hazel wood
It’s the press and squeeze and strain of a mutation
it’s the hooting of an owl along your spine
it’s the block, the wire, the moment of incision
the presence and the constancy of rain
It’s the parting of the liquid from the solid
the unstable balance of a dry stone wall
the cavorting of a beck in April sunlight
it is the final crumbling of it all
That is magnificent! I’m really glad to have had the chance to read it. I particularly like’ the first frost glinting in the hazel wood’, ‘the presence and the constancy of rain’, and of course the dark and beautiful final line. wonderful