All Comments on 'Driving South'

This is a poem that some might argue is not really poetry. But it is to me. Maybe because you are describing a route I think is among the most beautiful I've seen.

I have not been back to these mountains in many years, but you poem certainly conveys their beauty.

The descriptions in your poetry are second to none. I have never seen your mountains but you take me there. Thank you for the read

the first stanza

Leaving Burlington for the long drive home.

A (good) trip, with (good) business days,

and sweet, loving nights.

Heading south, through Shelburne,

Route 7 stays high on a ridge

...................................................imo you should lose one or the other

I was driving with you. this would look good in Tod's driving the tarmac thread

top marks OB

though it was perhaps a little too like prose at times, and I expected something more at the end, knowing your tendency to land a telling punch in the last round.

Nice read nevertheless, and a route I would love to explore one day.

But Hollywood movies may have shown me these mountain ranges seated right here in a Mumbai Multiplex : thnx for sharin' , high 5-ed .

Well, OldBear, you may or may not know this, but you're describing a route I've taken too many times to count, the latest being last Monday, inasmuch as Vermont is where I live.

I was "home" to you... but we must graciously let go of what is not meant for us... no amount of wishing can change reality.

Thank you for reviving my early memories of vacationing/ traveling in this area, not far from my childhood home. I learned to swim in Lake George (it was either that or freeze).

I have just discovered your poems. As you've said in your poem “In Too Deep” about others' poems, your poems, too, make me want more from you. I think you would be able to write some very touching, beautiful, and erotic stories.

I think that this is very nearly a very good poem but that it does not quite work.

I think that it works well until the last verse but would need to see these first verses with a changed last verse to be sure. The intent and feelings expressed are irreproachable.

I am happy with the double use of ‘good’ and I think the Lake Champlain single line is an excellent break.

For some reason, I am itching to put a ‘the’ before ‘distance’ at the end of the third verse.

But the last verse. I do not like ‘exquisite’. Not the sound but the meaning and what is carried with the word. It is a word of precise prettiness – say looking down at a landscape from a high aeroplane. But it is inconsistent with the grandeur implicit in the first 3 and a bit verses. ‘Beautiful’ accentuates this as it is too often used casually as a word and is a bit empty as a consequence.

The repetition in the three lines describing choices do not seem to work and seem slightly clumsy. Thus the use of ‘may’. Are you saying that choices ‘may or may not beckon you’ or is it as in ‘we may be getting older’ – and of course we are (I do not know the technical term for this)? Either way it jars. The sentiment is there waiting to be expressed. A little reworking and ....

As always, my opinion only.

It is your name, when I see it on the new poems list, that gives me the warmest feeling of anticipation.

Your text painted a very clear image in my head of these two ranges to the west and east, and the lake in the valley, and it makes me wish that I could see a picture of it to compare with what I came up with.