Earth-sweat, sea-breath,
hangs about, cold-shouldering street corners,
disconsolate, untouchable,
smothers horizons, pockets whole villages,
sprays dirty thumb-smudge graffiti
on city walls, in ditches,
spits chill onto the woollen scarves of citizens,
who shrink into their coats, avert their gaze
until the cloud-fall sighs and heaves itself away
- a slow unfathomable fade -
to hide in low valleys and the shadows of churches,
waiting to muster when the day's back is turned.
It is difficult to write about the movement of fog without thinking either of the opening of Dickens's Bleak House, or the fog-cat in Eliot's 'The Love-song of J.Alfred Prufrock'. But this simple, 12-line description is remarkably free of those particular influences. It begins with two arresting spondees, "Earth-sweat, sea-breath" - compound nouns, reminiscent of Hopkins. Then it unfolds slowly in a single sentence of free verse, spreading across the page in longer and longer lines, to mimic the engulfing gloom. The verbs are well-chosen to convey the active, versatile movement of the fog - "smothers", "pockets", "sprays", "spits", "heaves". "Cold-shouldering" is clever, and exactly right.
Review by Lucy Newlyn
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