Robert Peake came out quietly swinging, a fist in a cotton wool glove, and delivered his knockout blow.
About three lines into his poem, Father-Son Conversation, I was sniffing and concentrating REALLY hard on getting the highlights and shadows right on the photo I’d just taken. Okay so he had caught my weakness – with an eighteen month old the hormones are still somewhat surging – so his tale of a baby boy who didn’t make it (seven years in the telling) made me weep.
Sometimes poetry makes straight for my veins and converts my blood to emotion.
There were other perfectly good poems – about rain, snowflakes, have an empowering day, taxi drivers, the elegant work of homing pigeons, snowflakes – but to be honest I was still rowing ‘the underground waters’, inadvertently trying grief on for size and feeling glad I couldn’t have written that poem.
Written by Louisa Davison
Robert Peake, author of The Silence Teacher and new pamphlet, The Knowledge, was at Lower Shaw Farm as part of the Swindon Festival of Poetry.
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