More Sarah James Poetry

Today we have the fourth Sarah James poem to appear on this site, and it’s a nicely crafted folding mirror that tells a complete and touching story.

I’ll pass you over to Sarah to introduce the poem and Bookworms follows straight after.

Introduction: Loosening the Binding

by Sarah James (aka Sarah Leavesley, at http://www.sarah-james.co.uk )

My poem Bookworms was written to test out the folding mirror form and explore the looser boundaries it allows compared to the more traditional palindromic mirror poem. Here the poem folds around a crucial central line: ‘But we reached a full stop…’, with a mirroring of lines in terms of the punctuation and the number of words in each line. This seemed a subtler, more appropriate representation of the book form than a full palindromic (the same words) mirror form. The two pages do not mirror each other but are connected and similar in terms of lay-out. For similar reasons, I also chose to rhyme the paired folding mirror lines: kiss and miss, stacks and syntax…

The Poem: Bookworms

It started with the great bard, his starstruck lovers’ first kiss.
Romance was strengthened by the pungent smell of library stacks.
As we slowly savoured book titles letter by lingering letter,
words collapsed beneath us, skin caressed knobbly spines.

But we reached a full stop. Something didn’t flow…

stumbled over true emotion, hidden between poetic lines.
Our relationship stretched with spaces different interests now filled better,
Newton’s theories fascinated you more than my questioning English syntax.
It was no tragic love tale, but a lucky near miss.