I’ve never posted here before, but have enjoyed occasionally visiting the site to see how things were progressing with the “bake off”. Some good sonnets, and thanks to Tim and Rhina: to Tim for his enthusiastic presentation of the work here, and for including my sonnet, and to Rhina for her insightful commentaries/critiques of the poems. I have posted no response to individual poems for the usual reason, lack of time; besides, I do enough responding to poems submitted for The Dark Horse as it is. But for the record, and among a strong field, my own favourites here are ‘Hardy’; ‘Phenonomenon’; ‘Unposted’; ‘Millay’s Child’; ‘Charlegmagne’s Vision’; and ‘Aftershocks’. I enjoyed Tim’s plain speaking in a poem I knew; conversely, Deborah Warren has a remarkable ability to harness exuberant language in a strict form. She is also unusual among writers in form in dealing with what one might call “visionary realities” one would associate with a Whitman or a Jeffers; in this respect she reminds me a little of Hopkins, without his peculiarity. Her work has an arresting Anglo-saxon energy married to a formal grace. Robert Crawford’s poem I enjoyed for its documentary veracity, and nice touches such as the puns on “lines” and “affairs” (and was interested in the echo of “Out, Out--” at the end); Paul Lake’s, for its linguistic density which in other hands might have become clotted but here is almost ironically gorgeous; ‘Hard Winter’ I liked for its social empathy, a quality not too common among New Formalists; ‘Forty-Eight’ -- which I published in The Dark Horse -- for its humour, wry affection, and the surprise of that “dropped” drift.
Taking up Bruce McBirney’s suggestion I’m posting a bit of background to ‘Singing Bird’ on its thread.
Gerry Cambridge
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