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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.

Philip Hancock’s City Works Dept. was published by CB editions in 2018. His debut pamphlet Hearing Ourselves Think (Smiths Knoll) was a Guardian Book of the Year choice. ‘Jelly Baby’, a film-poem, screened at various short film festivals and was published by Areté

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