Samuel Tongue

Hibernating animals don't even dream.

It's okay if you can't imagine spring.

Sleep through the alarm of the world.

Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, sweetheart, instead of a grave.

There was an echo here of the conversational address that Andrea uses where the poem is always in relationship.

It's intimate.

It's always trying to speak more widely than simply self-reference.

One of the participants here found the hopefulness of this poem around the fact that the idea that depression is a season.

It's a kind of that you can hibernate through perhaps.

It's a phase.

It's a time of life or a time of the kind of years of life and not the be all and end all so that the hopelessness is actually a den.

It can be a place for nurture rather than complete loss.

And bringing that into a conversation with the previous poem, here it felt like the poet was in control or trying to control and develop a way of understanding depression, to give it a structure, to give it a meaning.

And that felt like a key understanding of how to read Andrea's poetry more widely, that it's always in conversation, it's always in community, a means of response to situations and to give them meaning.

So that was just an insight into how we responded to these two poems.

Of course, there would be myriad other responses.

if you were to bring them to a group and to read them together.

But that was just an insight into some of the paths that our conversations took.

You can, if you enjoyed the sense of what we do there, you can join our Nothing But The Poem group as a friend of the SPL.

As I say, we meet on the first Friday of the month, so that's 12 a year, and we get to delve into