Peaches, by Peter Davison

Today is a blue and yellow day, my favourite kind. It's crisp, bright, cold, and I am off work, so generally quite cheery. I've also been doing some baking, which is why I've chosen a taste poem for this week. I found the poem in Neil Astley's anthology, Being Alive. Anthologies are fascinating things in themselves; they can be historic artefacts, period literature guides, they can speak on one topic or many, and in this particular case, they can even double as a self-help book. I love this collection for the way it has been curated - poems by writers old and new on different themes, from 'Taste and See', to 'Being and Loss'. A teacher of mine used to base classes around poems randomly chosen from this collection, encouraging spontaneous and instinctive reactions to poems and poets unheard of - interacting with poetry this way is a lovely way of reading and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Peaches

A mouthful of language to swallow:
stretches of beach, sweet clinches,
breaches in walls, pleached branches;
britches hauled over haunches;
hunched leeches, wrenched teachers.
What English can do: ransack
the warmth that chuckles beneath
fuzzed surfaces, smooth velvet
richness, plashy juices.
I beseech you, peach,
clench me into the sweetness
of your reaches.

Peter Davison 

The first thing to note about this poem has to be the intricate sounds moving throughout it. To my mind, Davison does exactly what a good poet should: he makes the reader interact with his words by writing about a self-enacting idea. This poem is a 'mouthful', best when read aloud, when each word is tasted and tested like the sweetness of a peach. There's so much going on in these lines - noun phrases, internal rhymes, repeated sounds, multi-sensory imagery - so much so that when looked at without properly reading, or reading sequentially, the lines don't seem to make any sense. It's recognisable as English, but strangely foreign, like an Edward Lear poem, or the Jabberwocky. The chaotic devices are almost working at cross purposes. In the imagery for example, the vast 'stretches of beach' image is juxtaposed with the intimate physicality of 'sweet clinches', whilst the hard 'ch' sounds negate the softness of the rich and juicy fruit of which the poet writes. These elements exemplify Davison's thought that English can 'ransack / the warmth that chuckles beneath' - language is almost sentient in the poem. 

I want to look at two words in the poem particularly closely. To my eye, they stand out quite simply because I had to look for their definition. This may well be a reflection on my poor vocabulary, but it's interesting. The first is 'pleached', a word used to describe the branches of trees woven, interlaced or entwined together to form a cover of sorts. It's a symbol of natural growth, development, the ways in which separate elements can come together to create a new thing or purpose - it's an intriguing metaphor for language itself, forming in the mouth and emerging as communication and connection. I particularly enjoy the fact that the word itself is new to me, foreign, the way even your own language can be sometimes. The same principles follows for 'plashy', or, abounding with pools and puddles. Essentially the word means marshy, or wet, but rolls off the tongue a little sweeter. In a very simple way, plashy and pleached are enjoyable words to say, to feel in the mouth, and again Davison draws us back to the sensation of biting a juicy peach - itself a literary buzzword. So the question Davison asks is borrowed ever so slightly from an earlier poet - do I dare to eat a peach? For Davison, language is sensual, seductive, all about sound and taste. There's more to be said about his structure, the extended caesura, the compact sentences, but for me these devices simply emphasise the sweet succinct nature of his language. This is a poem to say aloud, to try for yourself, to taste. 

Introduction

What happens when you read a poem? Sometimes the writing washes over you, sometimes it puts up a bit of a fight, sometimes it reaches out to you and sometimes it comes over a little shy. It can be the simplest thing in the world, and it can also feel like an exercise in cerebral multi-tasking. It shimmers, it changes, it is a fundamentally fickle form. Thousands of fine thinkers have devoted themselves to deciphering the poetic act, deciding what it is to write, and perhaps more importantly, what it is to read.

For me, poems start a conversation that I rarely want to finish. I love the intricacies and possibilities that can be found in a single, finely-wrought poem, and I want to respond to it, to whisper back. I am interested in ways of seeing, in the perceptual process of reading, the patterns in language, and the importance of poetry in modern society.  

This project is a way of keeping my hand in a world of words - it's important to me to continue interacting with poetry as a 9 to 5 graduate in the real world. Every Sunday I will write five hundred words or so on a piece of poetry in a bid to keep the conversation going. The Spotless Mirror is a phrase lovingly borrowed from a 17th century writer named Thomas Traherne. Like a poem, a mirror is an impossible surface - we look at it, we look through it, we step into it, and what we see is entirely our own. 

My name is Alexandra Sutton, and I am a reader, writer and researcher based in Manchester. If you have any requests or thoughts, I'd love you to get in touch.