Poetry Forum

Lie across the ground. Hide the truth of the unkempt, uncombed lawn. Muffle the sounds of the neighbours' fight. Soften the sound of tears from a child, making snowmen, rebuilding her shattered world from white. Reflect silver from the moon into windows and red rooms where the future is crushed. The...

Pauline - I loved it. Poetry doesn't always have to be po-faced and serious. It certainly made me laugh.

'Bodies'?

I like the ambiguity regarding the bodies... are they dead or just sleeping? A party or something more sinister?

Good job.

Thanks Dave/Jasper The Florentine is Cassio who Othello has accused her of sleeping with. I was trying to suggest thay maybe Othello wasn't wrong after all and she had been developing an eye for the young dandy... I think I've missed the mark and will have rethink about the last two lines. I'm sorry...

Thanks for all of the kind replies. I'm not happy with the last two lines... any advice.

(It's Desdemona... a la Carol Ann Duffy, I suppose)

You aren’t supposed to marry your teenage rebellion. But it was fun to break my father’s heart entirely. The rage was all black then – a long way from the fake curly-haired darlings that danced before me. And yet… now I have what I should not, tradition seems to appeal. See, there are two kinds of m...

Could you take some of the key ideas in this and turn it into a villanelle?

Just wondering if you could take out some of the punctuation. The line breaks will perhaps provide the pauses you require.

That's my point. Do you not hear the rubbish they say on the weather? They're always talking about cars having 'slidden' off roads... the first stanza makes the point about linguistic invention. I kid you not. I heard a dainty weather girl say that the 'damp start to the morning was seeping eastward...

Alas, not so balmy in the Midlands

Just to add, that the poem was meant to be called 'Raining Synonyms', but my fingers mistyped and I liked the slip.

I think this poem holds a lot of sadness. I thought it may have been about abortion or miscarriage maybe. It took a lot of guts to write - thank you for sharing it with us. I wonder why you have chosen the form you did. Also, does it need any punctuation to break up the flow or do you want it to rea...

Inclement weather is the mother of linguistic invention. Spits and spots more aptly describe teenage boys - not to mention damp starts seeping eastwards. Why have cars slidden off roads? Is there another sort of cloud than misty ? The whole damn lot’s too bloody persistent: with all the rain transfe...

Ahhh... very postmodern and self referential, but I'm not sure I understand all of the images "My frigid senses melt with the mouthfuls at your cafeteria." Too cryptic for me again. Are you saying that poetry is feeding you somehow and you are therefore unlocked to right further poetry? &q...

I rather liked this, but I think that you sometimes over-egg the pudding to get your point across. I think the poem needs whitling down some. "The motorbike came by yesterday and left her after two hours, adding to the silence on her wasted Texan plaine." I would change to - " adding ...

Your poems are always too clever for me! I like the image: "Alphabets go jogging over the belt of a treadmill," and the use of the verb "churn" helps to support the idea of this being hard work if that is what you're after. Is the pebble in the shoe something to do with the pedal...

Well ray, you needed to develop an imagination to survive Northfield!

Holy crap - I grew up in Northfield too, Ray!

I just wondered if the rhyme in the first stanza was deliberate and if so, why it disappeared in the rest of the poem.
I also wondered if the nurse could 'quench' rather than 'feed' his pain...?

It's so nice to read poetry that doesn't take itself too seriously. Afterall, angst written poetry is a modern phenomenon we can blame the Romantics for (God, love 'em). A good piece of advice someone gave me was that a rhyme should seem natural and the only choice. I think you managed this most of ...

Thank you so much for your feedback, Tom. Will rethink 'chew the cud' The full stop after 'stop the.' is a typo! How did that get there?! And lol about 'to water I have led you' being too prophetic and grand! I have made the same comment today on some else's poem and failed to spot it in my own. You...

This is an interesting poem. Materialism meets nature? I'm not sure who wins. The child(?) is taken away from their gameboy to enjoy the simplistic game of dandelion chain making, only for them to sell the dandelions at a profit! There's subtle cynicism here that I love. And I would keep the 'But', ...

I really liked the simplicity of this, but must take issue with "Seldom he complains". It has a slightly archaic sounding syntax which is not in keeping with the rest of the poem... He seldom complains ? I think it ends a little abruptly; perhaps there needs to be a final twist of understa...

Nesting in your chairs you stretch half-starved necks to be fed a can of worms. Early from birth you distrust our sort but now you are cuckooed in my tree. We begin. And it really is quite a thing. Because once I show you how to swallow and slurp the strings of words, you don’t choke as much as you ...

I think your first stanza is the stronger - it loses its way slightly in the second, I felt. Love the image of the tattoo and the use of assonance. Well done.