Padel, McGuickian and I
Here's the first of 4 stanzas from "The Butterfly Farm" by Medbh McGuickian. The film of a butterfly ensures that it is dead: Its silence like the green cocoon of the car-wash, Its passion for water to uncloud The poem is discussed in Ruth Padel's "52 ways of looking at a poem" whose description of McGuickian's poetry makes it sound rather like mine. I can see resemblances in the way that we use unstated analogies to bind images together - I've written Critics wind up their gramophones for icing cakes, lift doors off their hinges to sleigh through slush But I've rather turned away from this style of writing. In poetry it's easy for the meaning of words to ramify. What's harder is selectively amplifying some meanings and muffling others. This is done by the control of context. Take as an example the isolated word "flower". It could mean many things though the reader may need to be provoked into thinking of many. In the context of...