Wednesday 20 April 2011

Gross

Philip Gross's I.D. (1995) includes this rather neat thumbnail of Wessex:
Somewhere down the line I dozed and I was dreaming
I was in Cornwall, varicose with rivers, cramped in an armlock of sea. I was a crumpled map
full of words that were me too but what did they mean?
(The magic of google tells me that Greg Allan Brownderville plagiarised this bit of this poem in 2009). It's a neat image, although varicosed veins surely stand proud of the skin, and rivers necessarily are inset into the landscape. But the telescoping of actual land, into body, into map, into poem, is well done here.

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