Snowfall

[OwenEdwards]

I must confess I've never enjoyed snow -
indeed, I have rather been one of those
awkward children who shy away from fights
dancing in the snow, playing til the night,
constructing amusing carrot-nosed men,
sledding down precipitous hills and then
laughing like a glad fool at the bottom.

I finally concluded it rotten
when speaking to a homeless called Gary
(noble with bucolic splendour,
one of Virgil's dispossessed)
and hearing him tell of sleep in snowbright
city streets, sulphur lamps reflecting light
from off the ground, white as wallpaper paste,
his fingers red-black, tongue too cold to taste
burgers bought for him by drunken students.

This miserable delicate beauty
and its crisp crunch means nothing good to me
but still – in the snowstorm, shadows of flakes
falling, showing against the white state of
the ground like dots in sight when you can't breathe,
speaks somewhere deeply. I can barely leave.

[ray miller]

Bit odd and unsatisfactory, Owen, this coming and going of rhyme.Feels like patchwork.

awkward children who shy away from fights
dancing in the snow, playing til the night,

I think "dancing in the snow" is weak."shy away from fights with rounded lumps of white" summat like that.
That apart, I liked the first verse very much.

"a homeless" - it sounds wrong but I suppose it's right. So used to the homeless.

"white as wallpaper paste" - have you done much pasting? It's more grey, or colourless than white.

I like the sentiment at the end of the poem but the structure seems to have melted away long before then.

[OwenEdwards]

Thanks for the crit Ray; you're probably right on all points. I quite like the octameter in the middle, though...

[Arian]

The first thing that struck me was that the implication of lines 2-7 seem to confute the assertion of l1.

But, despite this slight logical conundrum, I quite enjoyed reading it - a nice, natural feel to it, and some strong sequences.

This...

hearing him tell of sleep in snowbright
city streets, sulphur lamps reflecting light
from off the ground,

is very good indeed. Worth the entrance money alone.

But I agree with Ray about the accuracy of some images, esp. the wallpaper paste thing. And "rotten" has something of a Stiff-Upper-Lip, Boys Own feel which jarred a bit.

Still, some definite plus-points. May be worth working on.

Cheers
peter

[Nash]

Hello Owen,

Just out of curiosity, "white as wallpaper paste, his fingers red-black" is having the white/red/black so close together referencing the Arthurian tales of Peredur/Percival? Blood on the snow and all that? Just wondering if it was done deliberately as an attempt to imbue Gary with a sense of nobility. I could be well off track and reading too much into it, just curious.

Thanks,
Nash.

[OwenEdwards]

Peter: Thanks so much for the encouragement; I think you and Ray have zeroed in on the chief weakness, and I'm grateful, so I'll be sure to work on it.

Nash: Not intentionally reflecting Peredur/Percival, but it was intended as a way of etching Gary more firmly as one of Virgil's dispossessed, noble as you say. Reading back it must be unconsciously influenced by readings of the Mabinogion, Malory and Jones; in fact, it particularly feels in retrospect like something from In Parentheses.