Just to let you know that the first three poems between Claire Crowther and Chris McCabe are now online here.
It’s one to read again and again – each response making unexpected shifts through an incredible attentiveness to the previous poem. To follow just one of the many threads: McCabe takes the simile in Crowther’s first poem, ‘love is divided / more like a train’, and makes it a wedding train. The wedding has no guests but ’still wet strawberries’ (although even they may not be there). That, in turn, becomes ‘[o]ne tress of strawberry blonde hair’ in Crowther’s second poem, which is qualified by another simile written from within the language they are both using, of clothes: ’swelled out of a collar as a tendon / might protrude from a slipping cuff.’ Clever stuff.