‘Syrup’

 

COMMENT

Judith Taylor is a poet who lives and works in Aberdeen.

“I wrote this for the last assignment in Miriam Gamble’s course ‘Peacocks & Hemlocks: the Art of Repetition’: I had tried to write about candying back in the winter, but the repetitiousness of the process was making the poem dull and I abandoned it.

In the course we looked at using inexact repetitions and echoes to introduce variation and unsettle the poem, so with that in mind I dug out my old draft and pretty much rewrote it from scratch, keeping a few phrases and fracturing the structure much more. This version was revised again following feedback from Miriam and my fellow-students.”