Ian Irwin – ‘suffer little children’
Benson Bobrick – ‘Meditation on the Rings’
I don’t like to say that I have favourite poems, but perhaps I could say that I have favourite phrases that appear in poems. Ian Irwin’s line ‘My palms I hide in steel’ is such an evocative line, of vulnerability and hardness, of the organic and inorganic, that I found it hard to forget when I saw it in my inbox. Sometimes I wonder if I’m envious of the imagery I see in my submissions. I find it hard to feel like publishing is enough. I want to write poems all over billboards in the street instead of seeing advertisements for mobile phones and expensive perfumes.
Benson Bobrick’s poem also is constantly inspiring me, but in a different way. I do linoprinting and recently I went on a trip to the factory where the inks were made and I found myself thinking about this poem, jade and how exactly you create an exact colour. As the poem says: ‘Its earthly wear is shown / more in its ambiguities of tone.’
Freya Buckley’s ‘Cut’ is a poem I felt I had to accept as I know that I have written poems like this in the past. I probably aged out of this emotions (but not necessarily into better ones). So to me, it’s a poem that many young poets have written, but not always well, and that’s why I accepted this one. I hope to see more of Freya Buckley’s poems in the future.
I live by a railway line, and I sometimes cross over a footbridge to go to work. Sometimes a poem is good because you can visualise exactly the world it is creating. It feels like a real place, one that you know. I watch freight trains pass all the time. I hear trains pass all the time, and I hear that sound in the second and third stanzas. I love the drama of this poem, where either something very dark has happened, or just an ordinary moment of living by the railway line.
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