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steel eyes
| Dark Poetry #4 |
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steel eyes |
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JenniferMaxwell
since 2006-09-14
Posts 2423 |
lolita rides a golden horse round carousels of veins and rats beneath the saffron arcs of night the sulfuric stench drifts through corridors and white rooms where tourin images lie black madonnas on magdalene linen her raven hair wing of a blackbird her eyes kohled and steel that draw down night in carnival-like swirls of color and light sinuous rhythms that chase the dawn through bruised slashes of lavender till cold white wrists bleed oxygen [This message has been edited by JenniferMaxwell (09-16-2006 11:12 AM).] |
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| © Copyright 2006 JenniferMaxwell - All Rights Reserved | |||
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lanaia74 Member
since 2006-08-25
Posts 67 |
This was brilliant! Absolutely AWESOME! |
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JenniferMaxwell
since 2006-09-14
Posts 2423 |
Thanks so much for the kind comment. It's a rough draft that needs a lot of work. |
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moonbeam
since 2005-12-24
Posts 2356 |
Humm Jennifer, if you are a "beginner" poet you shouldn't only be here. I hope, and assume you are in other places too. I will try to mail you if that's ok. Moonbeam |
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JenniferMaxwell
since 2006-09-14
Posts 2423 |
Certainly it's ok to email me, Moonbeam. Yep, pretty much a beginner, can't tell a sonnet from sestina. You mentioned Ted Hughes so I looked up some of his work. I read his Birthday Letters a while back when I was sort of studying Plath on my own, and thought them a little cold at the time. Must have been my mood, but today I read his Thought Fox and it's absolutely brilliant. I will definitely be reading more of his work! Not sure how much of it I'll understand, but his imagery is spellbinding. |
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moonbeam
since 2005-12-24
Posts 2356 |
Humm, you ARE taking notice of my posts aren’t you! I shall have to be careful what I say. Heh. Ted Hughes is one of my favourite poets, but curiously also one of my least favourite. At his best he is IMO almost unbeatable (but them I’m biassed towards poems using natural imagery and metaphor), at his worst as with the Crow poems and Birthday Letters and other even weirder stuff (probably Plath’s influence), he is simply awful. Thought Fox is possibly one of his most accessible and well known. The Jaguar is also one of my favourite: http://members.tripod.com/poetry_pearls/ePoets/Hughes.htm as is The Horses http://www.ouce.ox.ac.uk/~rwashing/research/twos/poems.html but all his poems that seek to make a comment upon our human existence by using the animal and natural world in sometimes quite complex metaphors are pretty wonderful. He’s certainly had a big influence on my writing. Another poet you might quite like, judging by what you write, is a poet from Fife, Scotland - John Burnside. I’m going to risk posting one of his here because they are a bit difficult to find on the web. Agoraphobia John Burnside My whole world is all you refuse: a black light, angelic and cold on the path to the orchard, fox-runs and clouded lanes and the glitter of webbing, little owls snagged in the fruit nets out by the wire and the sense of another life, that persists when I go out into the yard and the cattle stand round me, obstinate and dumb. All afternoon, I've worked at the edge of your vision, mending fences, marking out our bounds. Now it is dusk, I turn back to the house and catch you, like the pale Eurydice of children's classics, venturing a glance at nothing, at this washed infinity of birchwoods and sky and the wet streets leading away to all you forget: the otherworld, lucid and cold with floodlights and passing trains and the noise of traffic and nothing like the map you sometimes study for its empty bridlepaths, its hill-tracks and lanes and roads winding down to a coast of narrow harbors, lit against the sea. ~~~~~ I hope you liked that. I did e-mail you but I had to use my wife’s webmail as I hadn’t set up an addy. I’ve given it to several people at PIP now and she’s taking a dim view of her inbox being filled up. So I set up my own webmail - I’ll try sending you another mail right now from it. M |
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JenniferMaxwell
since 2006-09-14
Posts 2423 |
Thanks, I did like the Burnside very much (since his work isn’t available online, I’m going to request some of his books through inter library loan). I also liked the Hughes poems. Is there one particular Hughes collection you’d recommend? There’s a real Plath cult over here but I really don’t care very much for her work. There’s like a streak of bitterness, self-centeredness, or something in her poems that turns me off. And, like her letters to her mother, there seems something artificial or pretentious about them. I read Freida Hughes “Waxworks” and enjoyed those poems more than any by Plath that I’ve read. But that's just me I'm sure.  I don’t know what happened but I didn’t get your email. I’ll check to make sure I allowed email from PIP. |
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moonbeam
since 2005-12-24
Posts 2356 |
Is there one particular Hughes collection you’d recommend? Yes. New Selected Poems 1957-1994 by Ted Hughes If you check you mail settings I'll try again later. M |
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moonbeam
since 2005-12-24
Posts 2356 |
Oh and Burnside. Try and get "The Asylum Dance" |
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Falling rain
since 2008-01-31
Posts 2178Small town, Illinois |
Sad thing is that I've never have read your work. (Isn't that pathedic how you leave lovely comments and I haven't gotten the decency to reply. lol) But this poem is absolutely beautiful. I love it. |
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