Reading:
Seaside Rock One kind of modern poem I find tiresome. It opens with a gorgeous visual picture. This may be a description of a wave as it crashes On some Atlantic shore: Maine for instance. Another image follows, giving more detail, say Of a starfish stranded on the sand - which in that area Is not yellow, but a kind of gritty, not-quite white, The bedrock of the savage cliffs being granite. There may be further details: of the spray Blown back from fast accelerating rollers As they break a few yards off the beach, Or the kind of dried-out foam found among wrack At the tideline. These give a powerful presence. But before you’ve taken this one in, another flashes By and then another, each equally good at holding Your attention as it resounds in your head, Each equally enjoyable, it must be said. But only semicolons hold this scintillating Show of aural-pictograms together. So your mind hangs on to clauses Collaged only by rhythmic pulses. No grammar underpins the meaning So you can sense the structure emerging. For good measure its title is ambiguous And the enjambment curious. You must wait until the final line for understanding. Here the leading trope goes off like a firework blast To explain everything that came before, like those verbs So long-deferred that form the sentence ending in German. But I like my poetry to work from first to last Like a stick of seaside rock won at a funfair, Thought and feeling printed in the centre In a message both straight and true, ‘A gift from me to you,’ Each bite as sweet as the one before, All down the entire length.
Peter Lloyd Jones 