This has a pleasant enough sound to it but I think it would be improved by splitting the one block of text into four stanzas, inserting line breaks at 'blue', 'estury' and 'dolls'. Why 'Ship Lake'? I know it can be just a name but I don't see why that name. Is the place brimming with sunken vessels? If this is a dream--which I suspect it is because you go their nightly and yet the sky is eggshell blue--might not 'drift' work better than 'swim' in the penultimate line? Also, to keep with the aquatic language, what about 'shrivel' rather than 'grow small'?
i like the language of "waves lift my blunt limbs / the slant boat of my body" ... perhaps the alliteration and the buried rhyme of "blunt / slant" ...
i think i agree with jum about "Ship Lake". especially if it is going to be the title and repeated in the body of the poem, i'm looking for more significance to the name.
i don't mind ship lake and don't see any need for any 'why' about it at all. changing it back to gaelic would just encourage bad pronunciation so it wouldn't sound like you'd written it anyway!
that said you don't do much with it beyond having a swim in it which, as i really like the end, kind of takes away from that for me. maybe a bit more definition in the front end and the end will proper sing?
7 comments:
This has a pleasant enough sound to it but I think it would be improved by splitting the one block of text into four stanzas, inserting line breaks at 'blue', 'estury' and 'dolls'. Why 'Ship Lake'? I know it can be just a name but I don't see why that name. Is the place brimming with sunken vessels? If this is a dream--which I suspect it is because you go their nightly and yet the sky is eggshell blue--might not 'drift' work better than 'swim' in the penultimate line? Also, to keep with the aquatic language, what about 'shrivel' rather than 'grow small'?
i like the language of "waves lift my blunt limbs / the slant boat of my body" ... perhaps the alliteration and the buried rhyme of "blunt / slant" ...
i think i agree with jum about "Ship Lake". especially if it is going to be the title and repeated in the body of the poem, i'm looking for more significance to the name.
thankyou both, good points to work on. yep, Ship Lake is just the name, the anglicised version, I'll put it back to the gaelic to avoid the problem.
i don't mind ship lake and don't see any need for any 'why' about it at all. changing it back to gaelic would just encourage bad pronunciation so it wouldn't sound like you'd written it anyway!
that said you don't do much with it beyond having a swim in it which, as i really like the end, kind of takes away from that for me. maybe a bit more definition in the front end and the end will proper sing?
the gaelic isn't very gaelic-sounding :) thanks for your thoughts!
i adore this part:
I swim beyond shore-haze
seaweed-blaze
into eggshell blue
:-)
thankyou! :)
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