Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry podcast. This week I would like to look at a poem

by Tracey Kay Smith, the American poet, actually the American poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner,

an author of several collections of poetry including the 2018 collection weighed in the water

and the poem I want to look at this week is from that collection. So let's weigh it in.

Let's weigh it straight in, in fact, I'm just going to give you the first bit. I'm going to take

this poem really as haunted me since I first read it. So, do you think I should warn you that

you are thrown in at the deep end somewhat in this poem. So hold on to your hat because when it

first starts, you think, well, what's going on? It's going to be fine. If those mowers were

each to stop at the whim say of a greedy thought and then the one off to the left were to let his

arm float up, stirring the air with that wide, slow, underwater gesture, meaning hello and you there

aimed at the one more than a mile away to the right. I'm going to stop it there. So that first line,

I mean, we really are straight in there, aren't we? If those mowers were each to stop,

what? What mowers? So all we know is there are mowers in the first line,

multiple mowers and if they were each to stop. So if those mowers were each to stop, we begin with an

if and this poem is a poem about if, about what if this happened and there's a brief

slat of reality right there in that first line, those mowers were each to stop if that happened

and it's gone. Everything else is speculation. What if this happened? So the mowers, it seems

we don't know that they were actually ever there, but let's say the speaker is suggesting there

are really two mowers and then she's going to take them on something of a flight of fancy and

the line ends stop if those mowers were each to stop and that when they stop, really that's when

reality ends and the rest is the if that takes over. I guess what the speaker is saying is let's stop

what is happening and consider an imagined version of events and both mowers stop at the

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