THE WALL AS THIN AS A WREN's BONE

Part of our attraction to poetry is our attraction to figurative language in the form of similes and metaphors, and here we'll focus on similes, beginning with Dylan Thomas's 'wall thin as a wren's bone'. We'll analyse what makes similes effective by looking at examples from a wide range of examples, then use our own to draft a new poem. 

ABOUT THE POET

American expatriate Carrie Etter has published four collections of poetry, including The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), a TLS Book of the Year, and Linda Lamus’s posthumous collection, A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). Individual poems have appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. She also writes short stories, essays, and reviews, and has received grants from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors. After many years teaching at Bath Spa University, in 2022 Etter joined the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol.