Poetry Forum

jisbell00 wrote: ↑

Sun Nov 05, 2023 6:07 pm

Great! Thanks David. How about "You've come now to the delta" instead?

Cheers,
John

Yes, that's much more you (and not Him).

I like the first stanza too. You might lose the Shakespearean reference.

Cheers

David

Yes, very good. Is this a real novel or an imagined one? And was the whole thing inspired by a chance encounter with "the vapours"? Not a phrase we hear much any more, but it's still stuck firmly in the collective memory. I particularly like this bit ... He’d like to tip himself up and pou...

ton321 wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 28, 2023 12:22 am

David

Thanks, I can see how your version works but leaving out the developed bit seems wrong for the piece.

Tony

Yes, I agree. The same thought occurred to me last night. Maybe just tweak line 3? Or maybe not.

David

Just been watching Whitehouse and Mortimer Go Fishing. They were after carp (crucian, apparently). Beautiful fish (and I'm no fisherman). A few good pointers there from Kris, and I'm with him on the virtues of the final stanzas. Cheers David P.S. It's a sort of rewrite of Heaney's "Follower&quo...

Good stuff. I like the way the rhyming words pop up in unexpected places, like whack-a-mole. As John says, you've hit the right tone (which I think is one of barely controlled madness).

Cheers

David

Thanks John. Is there an AI issue here? I thought that was something quite distinct from the working of a mobile phone, fiendishly clever little beasts though they are, but it is not an area in which I am very clued-up at all. I do like the conceit here, though. Thanks Ray. I was thinking of a sales...

Gosh, John. This is dramatic stuff. Did this all come from your contemplation of convolvulus, or is there a back-story here? Or - and this has just occurred to me - is it an insomnia poem? I seem to recall you remember mentioning insomnia, fleetingly, in some other thread. Although I'm not sure that...

Thanks John. Is your Webster quote from "Duchess of Malfi"? We did that at A-Level, and I think I remember the line from there, along with not much else. Only, I think, the famous "malcontent" character - Antonio Bosola? A sort of prototype antihero, as I remember - although I su...

The souls assistant removes the simcard from its nest, slipping it over into the waiting latest model. Nothing is deleted. The transfer is complete but a bar is set against access to the former data. Everything seems new yet sometimes there is leakage. Faces rise mysteriously out of an unknown past.

Just trying to decide whether I detect either absence or longing when looking into long unopened books. More the former than the latter, I think. Still thinking about the "negative in the Dark-Room" image. At present I quite like this compressed version ... Who doesn’t love the smell of se...

Thanks chaps. (This is a very chappish forum, isn't it? Have you noticed? I like it here, but that is - perhaps - one of its failings.) Yes, it is archaic and Shakespearean and all that, mainly because most of it is just an appropriation of this: https://englishverse.com/poems/a_dirge ... one of my ...

I'll go along with the crowd. Good poem, but the last line needs bolstering a bit.

Cheers

David

Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren, since o'er shady groves they hover and with leaves and flowers do cover the murdered sweethearts of unfaithful men. Call unto their laying in the banjo and the violin to charm the birds out of the trees that they may sing for such as these; but keep Tom Doo...

I like this one, John, but I - like Caleb - feel there's a disconnect between S1 and what follows. I tried to read the whole thing as you addressing the crocus (or whoever the crocus would stand for), but of course the timeline doesn't work. It's quite hard to relate "showing off" to a win...

The stars press through the Periodic Table, That is a very striking line. I'd like more about that (and considerably less intro). I know I'm a pain, John, always urging you to cut and slash. I can't help myself, it seems. But you could be a little wilder. It doesn't have to be two stately verses of...

I think it's brilliant. And not too long. (It is a bit of a slab at present, though.)

I love your poems in this vein.

Cheers

David

I've put my comment on this poem in your Recording Poems thread.

David

Okay, I can't hear this at the moment - I'm having problems with the sound on my aged PC - but I like the poem. And I wonder why I suddenly seem to find myself in Kenya at the end, with no prior warning. But maybe it's not an African veranda.

Good poem, though.

Cheers

David

I like this as it is, Tony, but I think you could build it a bit more. Take off from where you are now, and see where you get to.

Cheers

David

Keep it up, John! I like where you're going with that.

I think it's a little long as it is, Caleb. Also the line breaks don't help the flow - are you basing them on syllabics or just your gut feeling? I do like the slap-bang start, but then one of those pesky line breaks makes the reader think that you are the lawyer until they hit line 2. And I like th...

For the moment I just want to say ...

I wonder, wonder who, who-oo-ooh
Who wrote the Book of Job?

I will be back with something more helpful later.

Cheers

David

It's a dramatic story, Lia. I enjoyed it more in the conventional lay-out, but I am a conventional old geezer. I like the build-up a lot, and I wonder whether the poem would be better if you were to leave them on the edge of things, suspended in uncertainty, rather than trying to describe - and illu...

Thanks all. This is a bit private/parochial, perhaps. (Got the alliteration going there all right.) Caleb has got it, and I see Lia is on the case too. The Cú Chulainn reference is a shamelessly invented one. The obvious reference, which I was going to use at first, is Achilles among the women, but ...