The train to London pulled out of Manchester Piccadilly in early afternoon. From our backpacks Michael and I, facing each other in a second-class coach, pulled thin sheaves of A4 covered in typed text and blue marks – scribbled comments, excisions, commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, slashes, ubiquitous question marks. I, white-haired, the elder, unsheathed a red flair pen. Michael, the one who’d made the marks, began to speak.

This was not my first rodeo. Betters had been editing my prose for fifty years, from college to uni to lawyering in the US, Britain and the Gulf. Hundreds of professors, senior lawyers, peers, subordinates and clients had critiqued my drafts thousands of times. Though I’d only begun trying to write poetry determinedly a few years earlier, and till now had sent none for publication, surely five decades being blue-pencilled was preparation enough for a brief session to shape several hundred words in five pieces of halting verse. It was not.

Michael smiled, picked up Sie Kommt, my reverie in sonnet form about a teenage love. He complimented a line – I thought ‘She came around the corner of the years’ was wonderful – then bent to his autopsy. Too many commas, he said – he’d struck six from the fourteen lines – semi, full colons and dashes; they slow the reader’s eye and ear. Use them sparingly; rely on line breaks and word valence for pace and rhythm.

He axed conjunctions and prepositions because, I learned, they’re the essence of prose. They dull a poem’s imagery, the vehicle ...