Once a mainstay in my poems, it gradually became an occasional prop. These days, it's a warning sign that my narrative isn't strong enough to indicate a series of events without outside help.
As a consequence, it's one of the first words to be taken out of any draft. Its removal is an implicit challenge to the rest of the piece to avoid a similar fate. Of course, there will always be a certain poem that demands an inevitable exception to the rule...
This review is an extended version of the one which first appeared in
Acumen Poetry Magazine in the autumn of 2025. Many thanks to the reviews
editor, Andr...
It's a word I've exploited in a poem, because it can mean "at that time in the past" (as in "things were different then"), or it can gesture towards the future, meaning "next". And there's the interesting phrase "Now then", whose meaning I've just looked up. Amongst other things it's "A greeting commonly used in the North-East of England". News to me.
ReplyDeleteHi Tim. "Entonces" in Spanish can be translated as "then" if it's sequential or "so" if it's consequential. It's a frequent source of mistakes.
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