October, and a rain-blurred face,
 And all the anguish of that bitter place.
 It was a bare sea-battered town,
 With its one street leading down
 Onto a shingly beach. Sea winds
 Had long picked the dark hills clean
 Of everything but tussock and stones
 And pines that dropped small brittle cones
 Onto a soured soil. And old houses flanking
 The street hung poised like driftwood planking
 Blown together and could not outlast
 The next window-shuddering blast
 From the storm-whitened sea.
 It was bitterly cold; I could see
 Where muffled against gusty spray
 She walked the clinking shingle; a stray
 Dog whimpered and pushed a small
 Wet nose into my hand - that is all.
 Yet I am haunted by that face,
 That dog, and that bare bitter place.

Winding up with a New Zealand poet - thanks to Harry Smith for suggesting today’s poem

As Harry observed when he sent this in, we ran a string of October poems last year - there’s something wonderfully gloomy about this time of year that seems to inspire poets to greater efforts.

Today’s poem blends the grey, rainy, windswept ambience of an October day with the air of tired despair that clings to a failing settlement, weaving the separate images together into a satisfyingly coherent whole. The scene is portrayed with surprising vividness - due, in some part, to the attention paid to the often neglected senses of taste and touch. The soured¹ soil, the brittle pinecone, the cold, wet nose of the dog, engage the reader’s imagination at a visceral level, encouraging him to picture not just the scene as described, but himself in the narrator’s place.

The form too - rhyming but irregular, the lines huddling together in tight couplets - echoes the tattered, dilapidated, storm-lashed settlement; like most good poems, it complements and enhances the imagery without obtruding upon it.

Biography
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/nzbookcouncil/writers/campbella.htm

An article on Campbell:
http://www.arts.uwo.ca/~andrewf/clippings/campbell.htm

— Martin