Poetry Forum

A car shoots past at the crosswords Just after, another shoots passed on the other road, cutting through the first car's slipstream. Both gone. One never happened though. ha ha - I quite liked this one. I presume you're describing how we scan the white squares on a crossword, mentally selecting and...

Hi cynwulf - a great little poem. thanks for the read. nit: as scarlet as the arterial blood that would in seconds cap his head. sounds a bit too wordy to me. 'scarlet as the arterial blood in seconds to cap his head' sounds a bit better perhaps. I'm also bothered by the reference to a 'stall' in S1...

Hi - the melodrama doesn't really work for me. I think you're trying to say too many things. The description of your coke trip is drama enough, but to add the murder of your mother to that goes over the top. If you still want to end it with the murder, then end it at the murder. Dramatic things dese...

Hi Luce - IMO the problem with the poem is that it starts on a high and its all downhill from there. The ending is particularly anticlimactic. Perhaps rearranging the stanzas to save the punch for the end might be a better idea. Eg: “Some tape and a patch should do it. I’ll cover and smooth out the ...

Hi Julia 1) The separation of syllables is seemingly at random. For instance, why not every-one / get-ting, etc? It can't be at random because it's a distraction that adds nothing to the poem 2) When you say 'English equivalent' you are confessing that his language is not 'English' to you. It is a n...

Hi ray - enjoyed the read. I'm unsure about the stanza Progress works beyond the age of retirement before it’s able to draw a pension; it sees the country shrink and inequality widen, it sends emails of import and momentum, The first 'it' refers to the age of retirement, the second 'it' is confusing...

The idea of the poem is alright, but you'll need to respect grammar Willy Shaksper was a fun-ny man .....why the hyphen? He im-proved English and did all he can again, the hyphen. Is this some inside Elizabethan joke? doesn't look like one. And surely it must be 'did all he could'? To keep the rhyme...

hi Pauline - someone else commented on the last stanza being unequal to the ones preceding: I can only echo that. other observations: i) there's an overuse of enjambment, itself a heavy handed device ii) unrelated metaphors iii) too many abstractions, to misquote HH Franz Josef. Two magpies brought ...

The irregular meter jars. specific points below: Stumbling my way through life, living in an alien house, a stranger sleeps next to me; a stranger who's my spouse. .....two 'stranger's in two lines A year back my family had shrunk from three to two, silence has now replaced the boy I gave birth to. ...

When Archimedes had paprika, he'd fart and burp all day, and every time he'd scream eureka! Then waft the stench away. fits the meter if you do away with the "he'd" I'm not sure as to how he would 'waft the stench' - surely the stench would waft on its own? Perhaps you mean 'Til the stenc...

January frizzed my hair and coloured my cheeks a shade I never would have picked. Spiders have decorated the railings of the flyover in intricate white bunting cheering my dreary walk to work and winter's breathing heavily up my skirt . 'heavy breathing up' doesn't quite work. I find my smile amids...

Hello everyone. I have been writing poetry for a while now but still consider myself to be at best only an intermediate student of the craft. You'll probably see me commenting more often than posting my own poems on this forum. I find that you have a separate section for translations, which is inter...