Some poetic forms seem to be the gold-standard by which others are judged. The sonnet is one of them.   A bit of a ‘free verse bloke’ by nature, I make occasional forays into the world of rhyme and metre almost as if to prove that I can ‘do’ rhyming and metrical poetry (see 'Ask Me What I Remember' in Coma Songs). I’m delighted when I read these poems out in performance and it seems that I have used rhyme and metre subtly enough for my audience not to have noticed it consciously, but to have experienced, perhaps, a heightened sense of the poem’s cohesion.  But  I had always imagined that the sonnet form was slightly beyond my reach; perhaps I was a bit too coarse-grained to write a convincing one. 

Then I read Paul Durcan’s The Difficulty that is Marriage, evidently a sonnet in terms of it number of lines and general form, and in the brisk little argument it contains.  It was a blinding realisation of how a traditional form could be used in an utterly contemporary way.   

In August I had my sitting room, untouched for seventeen years, re-decorated.  All the books, pictures, furniture and ornaments of those seventeen years were moved out;  the room was stripped back to board and plaster.  For the week it was being done, I felt completely de-stabilised and wrote this sonnet from that experience. 


The boards  were taken back to apricot,
the walls were fresh, ivory paint and bare,
and the sawdust all swept up, that had not
slipped between the cracks, or hung in the air,
As books can tether thoughts, and keep them tight,
this room had been my heart’s book, whose pages
held onto my stories, prevented their flight.
and kept me safe through other purges.
Memories clink and touch and slowly wear,
they crumble under rugs, rub away slow
like old coins lost down the back of a chair,
in the slow friction between then and now.
This brutal nakedness is new to me.
with all my history now stripped away.