Hi Arthur,

Another fine poem! Strong and powerful! I took it on the bus today, then
kept glimpsing at it walking between offices and shops with a wide "I've
seen this! I know this!" grin on my face! Hey:
“Moss-sodden, lush, under dripping birches,
or pale as a picked bone, isled with lichen,
they stride up flanks of fells, true to contour.”
is so envy-makingly good!

But the next couplet seems too wordy to me, and again, it confuses me with
its collusions of words. I sort of sense there’s too much there! I mean I
find one word gives me enough to play with (and because the word seems to
get crowded out by the others) I can’t pause long enough to get enough from
it. For instance the word “loom” reminds me of the mill towns that occupy
the valleys that some of these walls touch... so I may want a couplet that
lingers on the image that particular word gives me: like (ahem) “Their
threads are warp and weft beyond (above?) mill towns/ weaving the grass and
bracken, grim and dour.” I know that’s not the best couplet in the world –
but this isn’t my poem! (& then, if I don’t like the rhyme, I’d consider
finding another word instead of “lichen” – but I sense I could use the words
“pale green” or just “green” or “some-other-adjective-green” (or something
altogether different – even tho “isled with lichen” is brill – it may have
to go!). I’m just trying to get the poem to talk back to me – say what it
can say instead of it feeling like a jacket with every pocket crammed so
solidly with everything it might need that I then can’t fasten it up
properly.

And OK, I accept that you might have initially thought the word “loom” to
mean “very-big-and-leaning-over” but words play with other meanings once
they get into poems. And, when the sentence gets to its end, they seem too
long, and thin, and everywhere, to be “like” sentries to me! And there’s
lots of other words that may want to be stretched out like blu-tak, become
malleable and stretchy and sticky, so other words adhere to them: you’ve got
sinuous (sinews...), sweep, bar... (and I'm already thinking of other images
connected with...)

Then, I guess, because mill towns are nearer the gritstone outcrops, I may
have to modify the 2nd line and get rid of “limestone” – and that may modify
or change the phrase “piece and parcel out” which
says two huge things they do (but the line may stretch this out with
something that’s let’s us recognise this more clearly). If it were my poem I
wouldn’t mind doing this because the word “limestone” also comes as a
surprise (it seems tacked on, and seems to belong to the line above far more
than it does in this line!). And I almost feel like saying they’re different
walls! (With different stone, different colours, built to confine different
breeds of cows and sheep, quarried from different landscapes...). And
because it's your poem you might have heard a whisper here, you might think
the same too...

And the line “Sack-draped backs hunched under the drench of centuries” is so
good! Wow! (I guess I like it all the more because it doesn’t just state
things, like “piece and parcel out,” does. It uses other words too! Like a
stone-waller with his stones, the wordds seem laid with care. But in the
next line the phrase “bent to deny” puzzles me... (deny what?).

I guess you’re well familiar with Ted Hughes’ Remains Of Elmet, and Norman
Nicholson’s poems too. They each get to grips with stone walls. Like with
your poem here, there’s the feel and the weight of the walls and their
stones.

A fine read Arthur!

Bob



>From: Arthur <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: New sub: Dry Stone Walls
>Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 08:37:25 -0000
>
>                       Dry stone walls
>
>Harsh as the dialect, hewn from millstone grit
>or limestone they piece and parcel-out the shires.
>Wind-fingers probe between stones' ill-fit
>Moss-sodden, lush, under dripping birches,
>or pale as a picked bone, isled with lichen,
>they stride up flanks of fells, true to contour.
>The sinuous mass and loom and sweep of them
>bars the land like silent sentries, grim and dour.
>
>Some mammoth greed conceived this lift and haul
>heft and shift of a task, that bewilders,
>humbles us, such toil and craft in each wall.
>Sack-draped backs hunched under drench of centuries,
>men and stone, bent to deny, heaved like moles,
>to shape these  monumental barriers.




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