Writing Magazine April 2020

52 APRIL 2020 http://www.writers-online.co.uk

POETRY WORKSHOP

Time & place

S

ome poems create their impact by doing nothing

more than examining a moment in time. They look

at it through the senses and resonances that give

colour to life, and fix it for their readers as much as

for their writer.

The perfect example of this is Adlestrop by Edward Thomas. A

train stopped – and the day and the station were immortalised

when the moment was fixed geographically and by season,

described in images of sight, sound and, by implication, smell.

The same technique animates At 7 am, by Marian Cleworth

of St Helens, Merseyside. The title fixes the time, text pinpoints

the location, and the narrator’s situation is communicated via

images of sight, sound and touch. The scene is urban instead of

rural, and the poem relies on slant rather than full rhyme, but

there is a definite echo between the two pieces.

Marian has delighted in poetry all her life, and tells how,

when she was only seven, ‘my teacher used to read us poems

every afternoon. I was spellbound. The rhythm and flow of

words and sounds in each poem excited me – I used to long to

hear more. I soon began to ask my parents for poetry books!’

That early love of poetry never abated, and, like so many of

us, she started writing her own poetry as a teenager and has

never stopped. Her preferred form takes metre and rhyme, but

she appreciates the value of listening to the poem and the way it

wants to be written. On this occasion, free verse was the obvious

medium. The poet explains: ‘I chose free verse to give the poem

more weight and greater impact. It meant that I could vary line

length and repeat certain phrases to emphasise the emotion.

I wanted the reader to feel the weight of that rucksack and

the stab of the pain... but to know that even with everything

stashed against you, you can still move forward.’

The best free verse has two features: careful lineation and

plenty of slant rhymes. When there is no set line length, the line

should break naturally at the end of a phrase, rather than with

an awkward severing at an illogical point. Here, phrasing and

line breaks work beautifully together. It’s also desirable to end

each line with a strong, specific word, not a ‘worker-bee’ word

such as the or in. Again, that practice has been followed, with

words like swan, farewell, pavement and rucksack placed at the

line’s end, its strongest point, taking advantage of the extra hint

of emphasis the positioning affords them.

Slant rhyme weaves its way through the text. In the centre

is the repetition of dirty while the title, an integral part of any

poem, is repeated half way through. The alliteration in the

opening lines of watch/with/white/wake/wave makes use of the

sustained semi-vowel sound of the w, while the consonance of

Alison Chisholm explores the way a poem can capture a particular moment in time

Time & place

AT 7 am

I watch your car pull away

with barely a sound,

gliding into traffic, a huge, white swan,

no ripples in its wake.

You don’t look back—

no final glimpse, no wave farewell.

You leave me, standing,

rain soaked,

on this dirty pavement,

in this dirty town

at 7 am.

I heave my rucksack,

roll its burden across shoulders too tired to care

and raw pain stabs.

You’ve gone –

reversing into your old life with easy confidence,

while I, in battered, toe-scuffed boots,

inch my way forward,

alone.