An emerging way of working, or trope, in quite a few Likestarlings chains is that one poet fractures and scrambles, or opens out, while the other tidies up, makes concrete and stays for longer on particular details. That’s one feature of this conversation, where after his initial turn, Luke Kennard works over lots and lots of images in each dense poem (and similes, this one a cracker: ‘The crows, necessary and solemn as bad excuses’). Each time, Richard Price’s poems appear more personal – number 4 in the chain: ‘For me [...]‘ and ‘I accept [...]‘ – but no less sharp and surprising in their imagery.

Finishing the conversation with Andrea Porter, Heather Taylor’s poem ‘The six’ consista of two six-line stanzas (’sextets’ as it says in the poem), which responded to Andrea Porter’s snowflakes, but also that it was the sixth and last poem of the sequence. Richard Price’s finisher also plays on its place. The whole conversation wanders around ski slopes and ‘Pinnacle wordfinder’ is like a mountaineer who’s breathing thin air’s memory of the previous five poems; ‘Don’t think: absorb’.

CK