All Comments on 'The Drought'

Bleak honest not over bearing. One of your best to date I think.

Thank you Tod.

This was sparked by the recent variability in British weather. Specifically, we had the driest autumn on record followed by the wettest winter. It is only a couple of years since there were all the concerns here about water shortages and low reservoir levels. I thought what if after all this rain...

Global warming no doubt. However, I cannot get out of my mind that in the Eighteenth Century the rest of the world found Englishmen incredibly boring as our only topic of conversation was the weather.

I do not think it is central how feasible such a drought situation actually is in England. I am at least partly referencing what goes on in East Africa – which I think we (including me) compartmentalise and cut ourselves off from. Also I am giving more than a passing nod to the Irish potato famine.

Also to Camus’s The Plague. That was supposed to be an allegory for the dangers of fascism I believe. I certainly have no such analogy in mind. If anything, it stands for how fragile all the comfortable certainties in our lives are.

Once I started it, I just tried to think it through and make it as real as possible and make the protagonist’s feelings and reactions as real as possible.

To the last ten years in Australia where they have been shooting cattle because it's cheaper than trying to feed them and water them. Suicide rates in farmers is through the roof and we have had the harshest water restrictions in history. Makes you wonder where it's all heading.

believable, not histrionic, moving, relevant and told with a fresh voice.

This summer in South America was hellish. What should have been a 24°C ~ 32°C plus sporadic rain weather became a month of 36°C ~ 42°C and no rain for over a month. Global climate isn't simple, and the effects aren't a linear increase in average temperature — the results of "global warming" is making the entire system unbalanced. Perhaps to move to a new balance. Perhaps what you've described.

In any case, what I just read was an interesting take on the post-apocalyptic genre. I think it's delivered quite believably. What I would question is whether it's a poem — and please understand, not in a mean spirited way. I do not know what makes something a poem, and something else prose. But I was thinking that you have enough here to tell a ficticious story (and you did), which goes far beyond what other poems do (consider The Coin, e.g., which is far more condensed, but also tells less).

With all that said, I like what you've written here, no matter "what" it is. It's well written and interesting. Good job!

(And I will return to the prose / poetry discussion soon, in the forum.)