Max - a relaxed rolling narrative with lots of story appeal and humanity.
But, Max, is the couplet form the right verse form to relate it in? It seems
to me you'd have more chance to vary the line lengths and to invigorate the
pace of the poem with a long mainly uninterrupted poem, using end-stopped
and flow-on lines in building combinations, in variance of calm breath and
more breathlessness, to create a more dramatic sense. Of course, it may just
be a case of me telling you how I'd do it, but I hope I'm being more
objective than that.
Breakfast is ready, so I must go.
Andrew
2009/5/27 Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>
> Holiday Snap with Antechinus
>
>
> In the ‘big scrub’ bush hills up behind
> Mullumbimby, northern New South Wales,
>
> my son showed me round: winding
> up a long narrow unsealed track
>
> to his rented big tin shed, mostly set up
> as his music recording studio, with tiny
>
> living quarters installed in one corner,
> unpainted ceilings, a gas cooker,
>
> windows that look over lush trees
> to a half circle of timbered cliffs
>
> and during the (unreliable) wet season
> waterfalls waterfalls waterfalls.
>
> A big weather system – said to be from
> the Himalayas! – had been pouring steadily
>
> on the region for many hours; his radio was on:
> ‘flooding on the Clarence River threatens
>
> the town of Lismore’ nearby, the new levee,
> eleven metres high, the predicted flood
>
> ten metres something, changed upwards every hour.
> Our one road soon closed; before others were,
>
> people were advised to ‘self-evacuate’.
> Electricity failed almost everywhere;
>
> we heard the power spokesman say:
> ‘yairs, we’ve had thirty thousand phone calls,
>
> and we thank people for their patience’.
> The websites of the river system showed
>
> graphs for each creek, levels rising, rising,
> if near the coast falling a bit at low tide,
>
> rising again. Settling in for a quiet time,
> we went to bed early. Should I dislodge
>
> the big huntsman spider from its corner?
> No, ignore it, it should ignore me, and did.
>
> Should a trap be set again for the rodents
> nightly visiting the pantry? Of course, somewhere
>
> warm and dry is what they need just now.
> Better if trapping meant caging, but
>
> it hasn’t worked. The late Steve Irwin’s
> ‘Australia Zoo’, not far away, might even pay
>
> for some of these deserving indigenes.
> See! between the rice and the rolled oats
>
> big ears and eyes, tremulously staring back
> at us ... no, set the trap to snap.
>
> Next morning, not that precious antechinus
> (the one that in the mating season
>
> exerts himself to death upon the female –
> self-evacuating? – to perpetuate their kind;
>
> no, merely a mouse, not quite extinguished,
> deserving release into the wet bush again.
>
>
> Wednesday 27 May 2009
>
> Max Richards
>
> now safely back in dry Melbourne
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> This email was sent from Netspace Webmail: http://www.netspace.net.au
>
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
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