I think it's a fine poem, but it's so constructed & neat that it doesn't
really have a very strong spirit.
the subjects & ideas are quite a lot like my own (in my poetry), the natural
bent is mixed well enough with musing, but it should could be more
nonchalant. this takes itself rather seriously.
I was reminded of a short story by Eudora Welty in the third stanza.
not bad, not thatt good.
KS
2008/9/10 Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>
> Here is the winning poem in the annual Blake Poetry Prize in Australia
> (form is triplets throughout)
>
> Mark Tredinnick
>
> Have you seen
>
> The way the trees—that sclerophyll fraternity on the mountain—swarm
> like Dante's shades as you drive among them in the rain on the way down
> to Bridget's place, as though you were the only still thing left on earth?
>
> The way the trees in their cardboard orders, their five or six slim,
> avuncular
> throngs, orbit in eccentric circles of disbelief about you. And till then
> you
> had thought that the woods stood still. But even the mountains move.
>
> And have you noticed how sometimes a crimson rosella and a little wattle-
> bird and a black hen drink peaceably from the same trough as though colour
> were an idea foreign to them, for a moment, and how the alder flares
>
> vermillion, and the elms are down to their underwear, and the oak is yet to
> turn
> its mind to winter, and the Japanese maple by the house is still at the end
> of summer, as though difference meant something more and autumn something
>
> less than you had thought? And have you noticed the way you smell the rain
> before it falls, the way you dream a migraine before it grips, and the way
> you write a word a moment before you hear it in a story on the radio news?
>
> There are words out there, and some of them are trees, and some of them are
> birds, and some of
> them are crimes. And one of them is me. There are strangers lost in
> the woods, and you are one. Night comes. Rain falls on the roof the way you
> fall
>
> Asleep and I fall in love almost daily with something or somewhere. And
> then
> stop. Love is a blanket we pull over our solitude. And down on the
> floodplain,
> the river lies in her nakedness and lets time play over her floating
> breasts.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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