Pawns and Pieces

January 29, 2015

by David Solway

An advantage based on pawn position
is a thing of relative permanence;
such are the infinitesimal, million,
petty contacts in parlors and kitchens,
daily arguments but without offence,
that consolidate the loved relation;

but based on the structure of the pieces,
since the pieces move from place to place,
relatively vain and ostentatious,
fickle, deceptive, gone without a trace—
the obsession with intellect or face,
the great encounters, the intensities.


Questions and Answers

What inspired “Pawns and Pieces”?

A feeling, during a rather difficult time, of the major importance of minor things—for example, what keeps a marriage together. Not the great declarations, the inspiring moments, but—one washes the dishes, the other dries them.

What poetic techniques did you use in “Pawns and Pieces”?

A six-line stanza, consisting of an intitial A/B quatrain whose half-rhyme sequence reverses in the concluding couplet, as if to show that the opposite of what we sentimentally tend to feel may often be the case.

This poem “Pawns and Pieces” originally appeared in Remembering the Sixties. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 152-153 (Spring/Summer 1997): 14-14.

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