The Garden

An afternoon just to ourselves, a gift
so rare these frantic days - to languish
beneath the drooping elms; in dark pools, adrift
amongst irises, gigantic golden fish.
Above the lake, swoop aerobatic swifts.
As if depicted on a Chinese dish -
a tiny bridge, blue hills half glimpsed through mists -
I drop a coin into the depths and wish
these days of splendour weren't doomed to failure -
each burgeoning moment wilfully missed.
Should we have paused beneath the azalea,
and in that velvet-scented stillness, kissed;
and risked with one impetuous embrace,
this sanctuary - our transitory grace?

Looking back in the Sonnet Board archive I think this was the second poem I posted, around July 2001. I was starting to have quite a bit of fun with the form and attracted some good feedback. The azalea/failure rhyme was a bit of a hit. There are obvious weaknesses through - lines 3 and 4 end up 'syntactically challenged' as I struggled with form and meaning.

More seriously, this still had a bad bout of 'poets disease', the diction and mood is very sentimental and gushing. Fellow writers on the board were very kind - concentrating on helping me with technical issues rather than laying into the content. The board's focus on formal and technical matters helped me develop, not just my skills, but a better understanding of the whole business of writing poetry.

Looking back now, I can see how right from when I started writing poems at the age of 14 or so, up until I came across fellow writers at the Sonnet Board, I'd assumed that what poetry was all about was self expression. I suppose, given that the poets that I first started reading - Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath - conformed to the stereotype of doomed but inspired geniuses, combined with a Seventies 'me generation' zeitgeist,  my attitude was not so surprising or untypical. What contact with other poets, especially American poets, started to teach me was that poetry was largely a question of deconstruction and reconstruction, or as Wallace Stevens called it - a sublime fiction.

Any inkling of such a notion was still months off - I just revelled in the pleasure of posting, giving and receiving feedback from people with a similar passion - it felt great.