Again, I found it so difficult to read this! The size, the SIZE! (Which,
confusingly, shrank to normal before the end... so I almost missed the last
line!). I mentioned it to a man in a pub and he started muttering something
about RTF... (What? I wanted to know... and never did!) All he said was
mention that to the guy who's sending! So, "RTF," Arthur, "RTF!" (but I hope
he isn't setting me up, that it isn't e-mail/internet speak for something
rude!)

However, the poem...

It's a good model to use for poetry, and you've got good control of it,
writing about two contrasting times (the fever's mentioned and then the poem
focuses on the time in the water).

I'm delighted to know Orion is still visible so far south! I'd heard it only
hunted in the north.

Your descriptions are full. The "round shouldered trees" "crackling stars" &
"sudden bone" all sound so contemporary but "bowered" "arbour" and
"loquacious" all sound a tad victorian to me (and "plashings" - with the
missing starting "s" also sounds victorian-poetic -  like o'er with its
missing v! - though I suspect it's actually not!). "Asunder"'s a fine
sounding word but maybe it's also a kind of ancient-and-modern hymn book
kind of word (with more emphasis on the ancient).

I think I might get to know more about you if I knew more about the fish...
and I got a sense of how you were because I initially saw the
round-shouldered trees - I then only needed one word about you to know you
weren't a contrasting shape but a similar shape! (so, here, I sense I don't
need to know too much more... in fact, I could perhaps get away with knowing
a bit less - naked, cold, white, pallid, sentient, skeletal...).

And, as always, you've got great skill at getting great endings! (but if
Orion's cartwheeling, and the earth is also wheeling... I get the
giddiness/unstableness, but the word's used twice...).

It may be, because you have the skill of creating powerful endings, (and
your openings are usually canny worded too) that the middle stanzas needn't
indulge themselves so dramatically. Norman McCaig, in writing about Scottish
wilderness, uses words and phrases quietly - yet the vividness's still
there.

Bob

P.S. & looking below at all the > symbols... is it that you're Double
spacing all the lines and then TRIPLE spacing between the stanzas? (I didn't
know you could do that?) (So perhaps that's not it...)
B


>From: Arthur <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: new sub: Bathing by starlight
>Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 08:52:37 -0000
>
>
>Bathing by starlight.
>
>
>
>Here, where the round shouldered shrubs
>
>drop petals on the skin of dark waters,
>
>gleams the clear and bowered pool.
>
>
>
>The night is an arbour of looming trees
>
>and stars crackling high over the bush.
>
>Strange constellations where cartwheeling Orion
>
>
>
>tumbles the rest asunder.
>
>I stand naked and cool, white as any petal,
>
>sacked by fever, pallid and forked,
>
>
>
>wedges of sudden bone; sentient, skeletal me,
>
>lowered into the grip of chill water. Lulled by
>
>the plashings of my swim and the loquacious stream,
>
>
>
>I roll and float, a pale fish,
>
>belly up, silent as the depths of ocean;
>
>count the countless stars, as the world wheels and hurtles






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