POTD

Eat Me - language

• “hips judder like a juggernaut”, “I was his jacuzzi”

• “I like / big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside”

• “his pleasure to watch me swell like forbidden fruit”

• “desert island”, “beached whale”, “tidal wave of flesh”

• “I rolled and he drowned / in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out.”

• “His mouth slightly open, his eyes bulging with greed. / There was nothing else left in the house to eat.”

Eat Me - structure and form

• three line stanzas mirror the layers of icing

• end-stopped other than sixth stanza, when the speaker begins to realise and regain her power

• italics present the corruption and twisted nature of her husband’s words

• half rhymes present a slight uncanniness to the relationship, which may appear normal from the outside

Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass - language

• “grinding its teeth”, “knocked back a quarter-pint of engine oil”

• “footstools, cushions and tufts / and its twelve-foot spears”

• “drove it vertically downwards into the upper roots”

• “severed”, “torn”, “cut”, “Overkill.”

• “new shoots like asparagus tips / sprang up from its nest”

• “like the midday moon”

• “below stairs on its hook, the chainsaw seethed”

Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass - structure and form

• Stanzas create a sense of methodical processes

• Short stanzas describing the pampas grass

• Final paragraphs short, like the slow emergence of new life

• Line lengths could echo teeth of the chainsaw

• Mix of enjambment and end stops present methodical and calculated rage

Material - language

• “paper tissues bought in packs”, “mum’s embarrassment of lace”

• “embroidered with a V for Viv”

• “never find today in malls”, “shuttered the doors of family stores”

• “killed in TV’s lassitude. / And it was me that turned it on”

• “eat bought biscuits I would bake / if I’d commit to being home”

• “I miss material handkerchiefs, / their soft and hidden history”

Material - structure and form

• Rhyme scheme XAXAXBXB presents a slow evolution from one system together disguised in the rush of life

• Iambic tetrameter, with eight octets, and one nine line stanza. Presents order, but not too regimented

History - language

• “rose or petrol blue / of jellyfish and sea anemone”

• “insomnia / of ornamental carp in public parks”

• “a toddler on a beach / sifting wood and dried weed from the sands”

• “as we flew kits / - the sand spinning off in ribbons”

• “war planes cambered and turned / in the morning light”

• “shells / and pebbles / finding evidence of life in all this / driftwork”

History - structure and form

• indentation mirrors driftwork

• erratic movement across lines mirrors erratic chaos caused by 9/11

An Easy Passage - language

• “the one thing she must not do is to think / of the narrow windowsill, the sharp / drop of the stairwell”

• “will reach / with the length of her whole body, leaning in / to the warm flank of the house”

• “for now both girls seem / lit, as if from within, their hair and the gold stud / earrings in the first one’s earrings”

• “workers about their business in the drab / electroplating factory”

• “head full of the evening class / she plans to take, or the trip of a lifetime”, “stirring omens of the astrology column”

• “flash of armaments before / dropping gracefully into the shade of the house.”

An Easy Passage - structure and form

• one stanza, presents a transitional flow from one stage into another

• Two long sentences, with two shot senteces between them, furthers the sense of transition from one stage of life into another

The Deliverer - language

• “crippled or dark or girls”, “bone, or wood, or something to chew”

• “Covered in garbage, stuffed in bags”

• “Don’t know of her fetish for plucking hair off hands, / Or how her mother tried to bury her.”

• “We couldn’t stop crying, my mother said, / Feeling the strangeness of her empty arms”

• “mothers go to squeeze out life”, “Feel for penis or no penis”, “Toss the baby to the heap of others”

• “Trudge home to lie down for their men again”

The Deliverer - structure and form

• Three sections which each present different deliverers

• End stopped lines in the first parts present societies set in their ways, enjambment in the last section presents the overlap and confusion left by the adjustment and displacement caused by the disparity

The Lammas Hireling - language

• “After the fair, I’d still a light heart / And a heavy purse, he struck so cheap”

• “Disturbed from dreams of my dear late wife, / I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form”

• “blew the small hour through his heart”

• “His lovely head thinned. His top lip gathered. / His eyes rose like bread”

• “Now my herd’s elf-shot. I don’t dream but spend my nights casting ball from half crowns”

• “Bless me, Father, I have sinned. It has been an hour since my last confession”

The Lammas Hireling - structure and form

• Appearance of order with four sestets, undermined by enjambment, caesura and lack of rhyme. Things are hidden under the surface

• Line length pretty regular, as if the speaker is restraining himself

To My Nine-Year-Old Self - language

• “balancing on your hands or on the tightrope”

• “You would rather run than walk, rather climb than run”

• “I have spoiled this body we once shared”

• “I’d like to say that we could be friends / but the truth is we have nothing in common”

• “lunge out over the water / on a rope that swings from that tree / long buried in housing”

• “I shan’t cloud your morning. God knows / I have fears enough for us both”

To My Nine-Year-Old Self - structure and form

• Stanza length 5, 6, 7, 6, 5, 3 - seems as though it is building to something, but in reality slips away and diminishes to something less than it used to be

• End-stops in childhood, presenting a completeness, juxtaposes enjambment of adult retrospection, presenting an unmoored yearning

A Minor Role - language

• “I’m best observed on stage”, “I’m here to make you believe in life”

• “endless / Exits and entrances with my servant’s patter, / Yes, sir. O no, sir”

• “my heart’s in the unobtrusive”, “driving to hospitals”, “Parking at hospitals”, “making sense / Of consultants’ monologues”

• “Whimsical soft-centred happy-all-the-way-through novels”

• “Cancel things, tidy things; pretend all’s well, / Admit it’s not”

• “Learn to conjugate all the genres of misery: / Tears, torpor, boredom, lassitude”

A Minor Role - structure and form

• Opens and closes with a focus on theatre and deception, concealing the darkness of the speaker’s life, as she conceals it from those around her

• Irregular stanza length presents the volatility and uncertainty of living with an illness which could act at any point

The Gun - language

• “Bringing a gun into a house / changes it”, “A gun brings a house alive”

• “You lay it on the kitchen table”, “fridge fills with creatures”

• “long metal barrel / casting a grey shadow / on the green-checked cloth”

• “Your hands reek of gun oil / and entrails”, “you trample fur and feathers”, “your eyes gleam / like when sex was fresh”

• “I join in the cooking: jointing / and slicing, stirring and tasting”

• “his black mouth sprouting golden crocuses”

The Gun - structure and form

• Irregular end-stopped stanzas present a volatility housed in specific moments (perhaps instances of abuse or relapses)

• Enjambment incites a panic or a subconscious deterioration, unaware of how one event led to another

The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled - language

• “when first I saddled a rucksack, / feeling its weight on my back - / the way my spine / curved under it like a meridian”

• “wiring money with six words of Lithuanian”

• “I discover / alien pants, cinema stubs”, “pressed flower amid bottom drawers, / I know these are my souvenirs”

• “the furthest distances I’ve travelled / have been those between people”

• “what survives / of holidaying briefly in their lives”

• “why […] I am less likely / to be catching a Greyhound from Madison to / Milwaukee / than to be doing some overdue laundry”

The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled - structure and form

• Irregular line length presents the chaos of travelling

• Enjambment across short stanzas presents an unwillingness to settle, even though she has thoughts to process

Giuseppe - language

• “in the courtyard behind the aquarium, / where the bougainvillea grows so well”

• “the priest, who held one of her hands / while her throat was cut”

• “said she was only a fish, and fish can’t speak. / But she screamed like a woman”

• “an egg is not a child, / but refused when some was offered to him”

• ‘The rest they cooked and fed to the troops. / They said a large fish had been found on the beach”

• “my uncle, the aquarium keeper, said, / but couldn’t look me in the eye”

Giuseppe - structure and form

• End-stopped lines present calculated schemes

• Free verse presents the forgotten order

Out of the Bag - language

• “its lined insides / (The colour of spaniel’s inside lug)”, “the trap-sprung mouth / Unsnibbed and gaping wide”, “a plump ark by the keel”

• “Not plumping hot, and not lukewarm, but soft, / Sud-luscious”

• “chill of tiles”, “steel hooks”, “chrome surgery tools”, “blood dreeps in the sawdust”

• “The little, pendant, teat-hued infant parts / Strung neatly from a line”

• “The baby bits all came together swimming / Into his soapy big hygienic hands”

• “The room I came from and the rest of us all came from / Stays pure reality where I stand alone”

Out of the Bag - structure and form

• Four parts creates the sense of a fable / fairytale

• Regular tercets mirror the imaginative power of the speaker to devise a perfect answer as to how babies are born. Furthered by enjambment which creates the impression of a mind running away with itself, but also that this lacks control and order

Effects - language

• “I held her hand, that was always scarred / From chopping, slicing, from the knives that lay await”

• “In each cheap cut of meat, in roast and stew, / Old-fashioned food she cooked and we ate”

• “they had taken off her rings”, “And her watch? — / Classic ladies’ model, gold strap”, “a thick rubber band / with her name on it”

• “she sat / Night after night stared unseeing at the television, at her inner weather”

• “blinked and poured / Drink after drink, and gulped and stared”, “took her pills and blinked and stared”

• “A nurse brings the little bag of her effects to me.”

Effects - structure and form

• Irregular rhyme scheme which becomes more uniform towards the end - mother has found peace, and the speaker is trying to accept that

• Repetition used throughout to create a sense of monotony

• Lack of poetic techniques reinforces the blunt perspective

• Two long sentences present a rush of introspection, perhaps a desperation to atone for his absence as a son

Genetics - language

• “My father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.”

• “repelled to separate lands, / to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers, / but in me they touch, where fingers link to palms.”

• “Quarry for their image by a river”

• “I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.”

• “My body is their marriage register.”

• “We know our parents make us by our hands”

Genetics - structure and form

• Diluted villanelle presents the breakdown and distance caused by the divorce of the speaker’s parents

• Mix of half rhymes and perfect rhymes presents both a distance and a memory of closeness

From the Journal of a Disappointed Man - language

• “a wooden pile, a massive affair, swinging / over the water on a long wire hawser”

• “men: very powerful men; / very ruminative and silent men”

• “indifferent and tired, so tired of the whole business”

• “leaned on the iron rail / to gaze down like a mystic into the water. / No one spoke; no one said what they saw”

• “with a heavy kind of majesty, he turned on his heel and walked away”

• “That left the pile still in mid-air, and me of course”

From the Journal of a Disappointed Man - structure and form

• Regular quatrains

• Mix of enjambment and end-stops

Look We Have Coming to Dover! - language

• “Stowed in the sea to invade”

• “gobfuls of surf phlegmed by cushy come-and-go tourists prow’d on the cruisers, lording the ministered waves”

• “vast crumble of scummed cliffs, scramming on mulch as thunder unbladders yobbish rain and wind”

• “grafting in / the black within shot of the moon’s / spotlight, banking on the miracle of the sun”

• “babbling our lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia”

• “Seasons or years we reap inland, unclocked by the national eye”

Look We Have Coming to Dover! - structure and form

• Quintets of increasing line length mirror waves

• End-stopped and internal enjambment presents the internal chaos of immigrants when neglected, despite the appearance of hard work and organisation which they present

Please Hold - language

• Title + “This is the future, my wife says.”

• “The robot is giving me countless options, none of which answer to my needs”

• “Wonderful, says the robot”

• “into my account / (which is really the robot’s account) / goes money, my money, to pay for nothing”

• “say Agent if you’d like to talk / to someone real, who is just as robotic. / I scream Agent!”

• “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please hold. / Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please hold. / Eine fucking Kleine Nachtmusik. Please hold.”

Please Hold - structure and form

• One long stanza connotes the monotony of the new future emerging, short stanza presents how the speaker has snapped

• Repetition of “This is the future, my wife says”, “Wonderful, says the robot”

On Her Blindness - language

• “One shouldn’t say it. / One should hide the fact that catastrophic / handicaps are hell”

• “bumping into walls like a dodgem”, “not finding / the food on the plate”

• “she pretended to ignore / the void, or laughed it off”

• “she’d continued / to drive the old Lanchester / long after it was safe”, “she’d visit exhibitions, admire films, sink into television”

• “the autumn trees around the hospital / ablaze with colour”

• “Rying has made her no more sightless”, “eyelids were closed in the coffin”, “she was watching, somewhere, in the end”

On Her Blindness - structure and form

• Couplets create a superficial sense of order

• Undermined by lack of rhyme and enjambment - not harmonious

Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn - language

• “A kitschy vase / some Shirley Temple manqué has knocked out”

• “kids in cars / on crap estates, the Burberry clad louts / who flail their motors through the smoky night”

• “throaty turbo roar / of hatchbacks”, “joyful throb of UK garage”, “screech of tyres and the nervous squeals / of girls”

• “charged with pulsing juice which, even yet, fills every pair of Calvin’s and each thong”

• “you garish crock / when all context is lost, galleries razed / to level dust and we’re long in the box, / will future poets look on you amazed”

• “speculate how children might have lived when / you were fired, lives so free and beautiful”

Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn - structure and form

• Dramatic monologue

• Mirrors the form of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn