Hi Sally,
Maybe I'm adicted to holidays in Scotland.
And this is how it is!
(And, for me, the image of the train sleeping "terminally" is clever... And,
yes, when it's there I can believe it's not just reached the terminus - I
can see it looks as though it's died! Brill!)
And I love the way this isn't just a "holiday postcard poem" - I guess the
way it transcends that genre, for me, includes the way the poets do what
poets do (in my mind they're Sorley Maclean, Derrick Thompson & Iain
Chrichton Smith - and why needn't they be?). Yet its up-to-dateness is added
to, for me, by the point that many city centre banks are turning into wine
bars! Knowing that adds to how I read...
And some small tweaking thoughts:
"singing spilt into the square..." sounds almost as if I've heard it
before... in novels it's usually light that gets spilt out of pub doors
(it's the word "spilt" that seems a word that writers use. People would
never spill anything out of a pub door!).
And the rhymed couplet ending the first stanza, then the repetition of the
word "away" at the end of the last stanza, seem to want sounds to work the
same way at the end of the middle stanza. I'd wonder about making the rhymes
a feature of the poem (and find another word instead of "away" - or get rid
of the first rhyme).
I guess one of the big issues of poetry in English is rhyme! It seems, when
it's end-line-rhyme, the choices are only "use it" or "avoid it." Which is
strange because it's often possible to play mid-line rhyme games where the
eye doesn't find the words too easily, yet the ear does!
I guess every poem carries echoes of centuries of conditioning, and, as
writers, we have to use it or subvert it!
Yeh,
Bob
>From: Sally Evans <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Oban, summer night
>Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 22:29:56 +0100
>
>Oban, summer night
>
>We were only there for an hour -
>no plans to travel on
>so strolled around the piers
>where a train slept terminally
>and the Mull steamer lay docked
>as the smooth bay of the night
>took its hot, short holiday from light,
>
>remembered stories of the past:
>how the young busker stood up to the laird,
>how all the seals would bob along the harbour,
>and how three well-respected Gaelic poets
>had walked into the Royal Bank of Scotland
>sozzled, and ordered whisky. (³Sorry, sir,
>this is the Royal Bank of Scotland.²)
>
>The same old pubs with open doors and singing
>spilt into the square, the quay, while boats
>crept out on midnight trips around the bay,
>a place to eat fish suppers in the presence
>of old and unembittered seagulls. A town to keep
>through years, though we wonıt stay away
>so long this time, we said, and drove away.
>
>
>Sally Evans
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