Summer Rain

a sudden rain

Summer before the air closes

                down with heat

                locked in a plastic suitcase

smelling of earth

               the sky ready to darken

               and break,apple-split

the crash of an unhinged window

               leaves in flight,

               the light lung grey               

as ants in water and panic

              heaven full of bolts and screws;

              now aware of loss.

               

Reviews

[Keith]

Amazing imagery, we get to feel the stifling heat before the rain, smell the heavy air and feel its fury unleashed.

[Cool Handless Luke]

Beautiful imagery. My dad's birthday would have been today and man how he loved the rain and storms. We used to sit out on the front porch in the swing and it just watch it rain without ever saying a word. This poem touched me and brought back some great memories. Very well done indeed.

[Lily Finch]

cool, lovely imagery :)

[Blue Ivory]

I love the imagery here. Your words can easily paint a picture in my mind. I also love the idea of heaven being full of bolts and screws :) You have an interesting way of describing things!

[Coyote Song]

Amazing poem! A very creative way to describe a rainstorm by its influence.

[Prritiy]

lovely poem, liked it.

[Helena]

`'smelling of earth

the sky ready to darken

and break,apple-split`'

Love that stanza, in fact loved all of them. Once again I was amazed at the wonderful imagery, flowing verse and high standard that is promised in all of your poems. Fantastic my friend!


Helena :)

[FJ Davis]

Your well-chosen words and stark imagery virtually recreate the event.
Most excellent, Leslie!
After having experienced this amazing work, enraptured readers must then seek towels with which to dry the rain from their hair.

[James Hanna-Magill]

Dear Leslie

Thank you for reviewing some of my writing.

I thought I would come and review some of yours.

I picked this piece by the attraction of its title.

My comments such as they are:

1) Structure: Unique. I like the way you choose to inset the second and third lines of each of your three line stanza. There is something of 'concrete' poetry about this. By that I mean the way the words are displayed on the page may add to its meaning. Whilst I cannot straight away find a connection, you may have intended one.

Frankly in the end it doesn't matter to me as all see is you painting your words on a page mixing the pictorial with verse.

2) Rhyme and Rhythm: You choose not to rhyme. It's its own style of free verse, which is fine by me As for rhythm, given that the lines are brief and of relatively similar length, there is an easy flow to it.

3) Meaning: There is something I find really quite attractive about this brief piece of poetry.

As ever the meaning is for the writer to own and for the reader either to guess or interpret in their own way.

It is hard to describe adequately the way I feel about this poem to do it justice.

However my best attempt is to say that the words themselves, the whole feel of the piece is more an expression of mood than anything else.

And therein lies its entire beauty to me.

I have seen very few writers on this site do anything quite like this apart from one, whose name I will not quote. But there is a majesty to the words and the feel of some of his writing as there is here in yours.

The difference between the two of you is he writes long, whilst you keep this short here.

In a way if you apply what you are doing here to graphic art, it has something of the Picasso about it.

If you take for example his painting 'Guernica' which at least we know is about the Spanish civil war (a bit like your title 'Summer Rain') it is simply a plethora of symbols, symbolistic art.

I gather that Picasso used to get really with anyone who asked him what his paintings meant. I think his words were more or less along the lines of 'You wouldn't ask that question about a piece of music, so why ask it about my painting?'

4) Imagery / allusion / favourite parts.

In the whole depiction of summer rain, I really do like the way you fly off at a tangential angles and describe the air as 'locked in a plastic suitcase'. A very unusual way of expressing it, yet I can feel the stifling claustrophobic of a closed plastic suitcase as related to heavy summer air.

Again with 'break apple-split', you connect the summer with its storm and the fruition of nature. I find that a masterful stroke of the pen.

Where you meaning escapes me, because I feel it is more a rush of words, is in the allusion you make in the third stanza:

'the crash of an unhinged window

leaves in flight,

the light lung grey'

Picasso? Whatever the words may or may not mean, when I read this poem, it seems not to bother me. In the end I feel it is 'ars gratia artis' and as I say the words in themselves are actually the whole point of the piece.

The last stanza I do largely comprehend but again your mode of self-expression I find (excuse me being effusive, I rarely am in review, but this is an exception) majestic:

'as ants in water and panic

heaven full of bolts and screws;

now aware of loss'.

I say largely comprehend simply because of your final line 'now aware of loss'.

Perhaps without there being something rather more subtle in your symbolism here, all I can read is that in the storm, the ants lose their ant hill?!

5) Overview: I admire this piece of writing for its symbolistic allusion, its rich mode of self-expression and for its rush of warm summer air that races over me as it starts to rain.

Highly accomplished writing.

Whilst my reviews are always balanced and I will tell the writer if there is something that they might think about changing in a constructive fashion, for me this is word perfect.

With my warmest regards


James Hanna-Magill