The Friday Poem on 27/01/23
We chose ‘Softwood’ by Philip Hancock to be our Friday Poem this week because while it looks like a simple poem it is anything but. See the way the rhymes and half rhymes – quarter / splinter, other / bother, planed / hand, tie / thigh – lace the poem together. Then that lovely couple of lines in the second stanza where the run of plosive, single syllable words – break / back / grip / hop / drop – reflect the experience of trying (and failing) to control the wayward lengths of wood. And then the pacy, falling rush of the last line as the poem swiftly opens out to an awareness of what someone struggling like this looks like from the outside, ending on ‘spectacle’ which echoes ‘back’ and ‘natural’. Precise, controlled, neat and clever – this poem does it for us!
Softwood
Two lengths of inch and a half
by a quarter, stacked one on top of the other,
planed: no splinters, no need to tape or tie them.
In one hand seems the natural way
to carry them – no bother.
Impossible to say how they come apart.
They break your grip, you hop
to use your thigh not to drop them –
hopeless, no way to bring them back
and suddenly you’re the spectacle.
