[Joe Crocker]

Hi Matt,

So the problem for you is that I don’t show how the male gaze of the narrator is shared by builders of the cut. That is fair comment, I guess. A problem here is that I’m trying to analyse my own poem by adding a post-hoc rationalisation. When I wrote it, I just put in what felt right. I had two impulses. The first verse is an image of the rounded shapely Chiltern hills and the second is about the man-made road cut through them. What links the two things is a male swagger, a kind of lust. I don’t want to get all psycho-analytic because I wouldn’t know wtf I was talking about. But there does seem to be some sort of underlying drive that links these things. Likely, I have failed to show it.

Cheers

Joe

[David Callin]

Hi Joe,

I completely get, and sympathise with, what you're trying to do here. (Admittedly I have the advantage over earlier readers of reading the subsequent comments and clarifications.)

Where it currently goes astray, I think, is in the last one and a half lines of V1. The "arse", especially, has elements of affection to it which you probably don't want here. Or so I think, at least.

Perhaps, if you treated this as a poem still not finished, and revisited those lines afresh, you might come up with something closer to your vision.

Good luck!

Cheers

David

[Susan McLean]

Joe, there is a difference between lust, which almost everyone feels, and rape. If you made clearer that the lust in the first part is more loving, you could play up the more violent actions of the engineers.

Susan

[Clive Watkins]

I agree with other posters, Joe, that the image-concepts in the first stanza immediately put the poem in a tricky place. If this were mine, I’d be reworking them.

Three other observations…

Would the forensic point of the second stanza be sharper if it began “But who would take a knife to make this cut…”?

And I wonder – in this context – what distinction separates “arrogance” and “pride”. More generally, I think the whole sequence of “self-belief”, “trust”, “courage”, “arrogance” and “pride” might benefit from closer interrogation.

The rhymes in your first stanza are all approximate, notably the emphatically placed pair “heart/arse” – which perhaps adds a casual or gratuitous quality to the offending image. In the second stanza there is more symmetry, the first and third lines being in assonance, the formally prominent second and fourth having perfect rhymes. I wonder if these matters might benefit from some adjustment.

Good luck with this!

Clive