Hi Colin,
I both really like this poem (what it's about and where it's set, and what
it's doing...) and, at the same time, I'm not so happy with this poem.
Maybe it's because I know the person is possible on their own, or with one
other person, and I'm therefore wondering "who on earth's he talking to like
this?" Is it me, am I there too? (If I were walking along with a guy who
talked in this tone of voice I'd be worried... more than Sammy Coleridge was
with Willie Wordsworth when they went wandering up the fells!) So, I hope,
if I were there, the poet wasn't talking to me like that! (or to anyone else
who may be there!).
OK, I know he's talking to (ahem) the reader who's got to assume they're
there too (crouching along just out of shot like the man with the microphone
when they're shooting the scene for the TV). But, if I'm supposed to be
there, I'd like to be talked to in a more friendly fashion (more chatty?)
and not told things that almost sound like cliches: the sound of the curlew,
the beckoning loch, the lapping water - make the phrases sound interesting
to someone you're talking to as if they're there! (I can get along with the
ghostliness of a stationary heron, but do reeds haunt too? Amazing notion!
Or is haunt being used in a less specific, more birdwatchery-phrasery,
sense).
I'm also wondering if the piece could be more specific about place? (But I
do know of people who've wandered landscapes with [more classically
famous]poems and then criticsised, afterwards, the geographical
innaccuracies (aah, anoraks every one em!). But where are we? A name of a
place, somewhere, may help...
Oh, and sometimes phrases like "spoil of mines" "crystals of quartz" "grass
of last year" sound OK with the "of" in the middle but sometimes last year's
grass, quartz crystals, sounds far easier to accept.
Lot of criticsisms here, but given to a poem that's worth them. It's canny!
Bob
>From: Colin dewar <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: newsub/walk
>Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 20:03:53 +0100
>
>The track
>
>
>Have we gone far enough on our walk?
>Shall we sit on a bank of grass
>and gaze to the beckoning loch?
>Beware of the storm that blows from the North,
>how gathers the blindness of night,
>for lost on the moors is many a life.
>
>The track has done well so far.
>It is made from the spoil of mines,
>and meanders through hills
>with crystals of quartz, of iron pyrites
>and pale copper blue
>that shine from its back.
>In our coats we gather such lesser jewels.
>
>Do you think we can make it to the lapping water,
>the haunt of heron and reeds
>to dip our hands in ambered shallows,
>to listen to the curlew's lonesome cry?
>Or shall we rest for a while with the grass of last year,
>go home with our pockets of quartz and fool's gold?
>
>___________________________________________
>
>
>Colin
>
>
>
>iron pyrites = fool's gold
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