The Sand

I loved the opening line, the sand of a billion years old, just a really lovely establishing shot like in a movie. We understand where we are straight away. You did a really good job of those nice kind of four line quatrains, the two first stanzas, lovely tight lines, really nice rhyming. And I love the depth of it, you go from this cosmic place with the hair like creatures of which I was never told, forgotten ancient species, and then in to old beings died and fell and sunk down to the sea bed, they washed up with the swell right to where I treasure. This lovely kind of sense of all of that history stands at your feet. Then your final couplet is just brilliant ‘I looked up at the sunny weather, waves continued to crash, forever.’ And your very precise use of a comma after crash, I love that because it’s almost like the sentence performs a little bit, the dramatic pause that waves continue to crash, comma, forever. Yeah really nice job Hugh, well done.

And just one final thing there, I was saying about the tight lines. The first stanza, third line ‘Here lie creatures of which I was never told’, it’s kind of a little bit long so I’d nearly say ‘Here lie creatures about which I was never told,’ it’s like how do you speed up the line, just to bring it in as it’s a bit of an outlier, that line sticks out more than anything else. So sometimes they say a poem is successful if it’s short and a poem has failed if it gets long. Now you know I always think push the conventions of scale, like don’t listen to people when they tell you poems should be short. But at the same time there is something about that one inch punch intensity of making a line as short as you can, getting it in to the person’s head or heart as quick as possible, so ‘Here lie creatures of which I was never told’ is a line I would work a little bit, but overall this poem is a success I think. Nice job.