Samuel Tongue

On the page, it's got two stanzas and it's 14 lines long and the first stanza is eight lines and the second stanza is six lines.

But other than that, I think that, yeah, the sonnet form can kind of

tempt you in and beguile you because the imagery and the themes that it explores are much harder to pin down.

So yeah, you can sit there and say, look, yep, this is definitely a sonnet.

But at the end of the day, once you've entered into it, it becomes something even bigger than that form.

So this poem is called Swimming in the Woods.

You can find this one on the Poetry Archive.

And the joy of the Poetry Archive is that you can hear the poet actually reading it as well.

But I'll read it to you now and have a listen out and see what you make of it on the first listen.

Swimming in the Woods

Her long body in the spangled shade of the wood was a swimmer moving through a pool, fractal, finned by leaf and light, the loose plates of lozenge and rhombus, wobbling coins of sunlight, heat wavering.

When she stopped, the water stopped, and the sun remade her as a tree, banded and freckled and foxed.

Besieged by symmetries condemned to these patterns of love and loss, I stare at the wet shape on the tiles till it fades.

When she came and sat next to me after her swim, then walked away back to the trees, she left a dark butterfly.

When we were chatting this one through again in the group, we were really struck by the, again, the lines packed with really descriptive language that kind of, they coin new images that even in their newness feel familiar.

That's how precise they are.

They're so precise that they actually feel familiar.

They feel right there.

So this, yeah, describing the long body in the spangled shade as fractal, finned by leaf and light, loose plates of lozenge and rhombus, wobbling coins of sunlight.

It's really original, but at the same time feels exact and familiar for that reason, which is a very skillful piece of writing.