Samuel Tongue

I'm not sure about the image of the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

That didn't strike me as a fabulously well constructed image, but that was just me.

But within the flow of the poem and the kind of flow of images, it does fit.

It does fit there.

Whenever we're discussing these poems as a group, I like to emphasize that you can dislike the poem, of course, and you can dislike

lines and you can suggest edits and you can as long as they're justifiable i think that's a really important part of creating an interpretation i'm working through why those words and those phrases and those images and those metaphors are there what is the poet doing with them do you think and i think that's so that kind of critical voice does not does not kill a poem i think it's an in an engagement with part of the dance part of the dance with a poem

Yeah, coming to that, it feels like the poem is very much centered on marriage, on a relationship that is kind of folding and fading.

But again, that's not necessarily to devalue it.

The whole poem seems to be about revaluing or valuing.

things as they disappear or as they fade, that feels like a very contemporary tone and conclusion.

Things fading, things falling apart, but that doesn't necessarily mean they need to be devalued or they are devalued.

And that certainly comes across in that final two lines where the poet says, I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph, which anything that can be described as a triumph cannot be described as a failure.

It was only a few pages on, but, and this is also part of

Yes, quite a lot of the time I tend to select individual poems, but this time I actually selected poems from the same collection.

Obviously poems exist as individual poems, often solo, often published in journals and in the wider world before they appear in a collection.

But I love how, and I think it's important to investigate how poems work as part of a collection.

And what happens when you read from left to right, traditionally in a book, you don't have to.

Maybe, I mean, some people start from the back.

Some people grab a poem whose title really speaks to them.

But I think in the main, editors and publishers tend to think you're going to read a collection from left to right, from beginning to middle to end.