In Michael Longley's poem "A Grasshopper" in his collection "The Candlelight Master" (Cape 2020), dedicated to his daughter Rebecca for her fiftieth birthday, he shares a "memory of you at four" when she injured her foot, then offers her "after forty-six years" a poem-within-the-poem, a "belated medicament", a "translation from the Greek / (Anacreon?) which I wrote / When I was less than half your age." Time leaps around here between the daughter's adulthood and a childhood memory she may no longer have, as well as between the father's poem composed in his old age and the translation he did as a young man – of a poem over 2500 years old. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 August 2021)


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Time leaps around in Michael Longley's "A Grasshopper"