Jefferey Donaldson at Jeweller’s Eye has done the most wonderful close reading and critique of my poem The Lifeboat, which was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2012 and also won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford poetry contest. I’m posting an excerpt below, but I should add that Donaldson has some brilliant thoughts on elegiac poetry in general in this podcast that make it a worthwhile listen. I’m so grateful to him.

“It is the simplest lines that are sometimes the most beautiful, lines that in their mastery find themselves on the other side of simplicity. Somehow it’s the matter-of-fact directness of the lines, time, place and action, that disguises the depths in every sense of the experience. There’s almost an Anglo-Saxon quality to this verse, you come just short of hearing definite caesura- a pause in the middle of these lines, a sense of the poem’s rhythms made up of so many lengths of lumber.”