The Tangled Branch Discussion Forums

Colm,

Sometimes 'rough around the edges' captures the mood better than too much polish.

Thanks for this glance into a world most of us will never see.

Gyppo

Once you see the cows' white faces as musical notes the fence wires could double as a musical stave ;-) In this musical context I saw crochet as a single note, rather than reading it as crochet the verb. I've never really thought of cows as musical, but a happy herd can sound quite melodic at a dist...

This comes from way back, possibly in the early eighties.  I can actually recall writing this on my portable manual typewriter, sat out in the garden.  It was a hot and sweaty day like today and I was sat under a tree, which provided enough shade to stop the paper glaring at me but did nothing to re...

Sometimes all you need is a smile.  Which this supplied, and which is still lingering several hours after the first reading ;-) I can imagine a performance poet delivering this with a touch of theatrical resentment.  When they think they've done enough for one evening but the audience want more. "Yo...

'To my American ear the words "lad" and "lane" sound as if they are from a classic Brit movie dealing with WW2. Is that your intent or is that language still in common use.' My generation still use lad, lane, lass without any sense of using it for deliberate effect.  I suspect having a fairly rural...

Sapper 1. (Military) a soldier who digs trenches 2. (Military) (in the British Army) a private of the Royal Engineers. ===== Ah, the sounds of war, which can evoke such terrors , or sometime just a quiet 'unnerving' in old soldiers.  My maternal Grandad survived 'The Trenches' in WW1 and even years ...

A group of feckless youths, bored with life, loitering near our shops. Swaggering with untested aggression, making mock of those who passed. Their leader saw me coming, targeted my long hair and headband. "It's like something from the bloody Bible." And his cohort sniggered. I smiled and ignored the...

Just a quick visit to say these two lines were particularly resonant for me. 'To sense how shadows feed through rubble  of a collapsed shed which rabbits shun,' Over the years I've come across a few places like that, deserted buildings or patches of woodland where no birds sing or even fly.  I've al...

    It is all too easy to forget the spoken result when in the creative flow of writing .     Written and spoken English have some distinct differences.     If you are regular 'performance poet' you may well write your poems in a way which helps guide the performance.  They may look more like stage ...

I've been pacing up and down, reciting it aloud and realised why I changed books in the first verse to book (singular).  It was to avoid the sibilant 's' which annoys me by sometimes tripping over my tongue. When reading aloud I have a similar problem with the word months .  It reads just fine, but ...