We'd sort of stand round it and gawp at it". In Armitage's poetry, objects are described with surprising exactness, partly for their own sake, partly for their roles in (often male) ceremonies and processes – and partly as instant metaphors.
Extending the theatre metaphor, in "Instant Living" she portrays life itself as impromptu drama: "Unrehearsed performance.
So, I called him up and he talked to us about branding now, London 2012, fleeting instant fame as a metaphor, and what it was like to be the human pixel who wouldn't.
A politician complaining about the press is like a sailor complaining about the sea, so goes the old line, considered unsurpassable until this week, when a group of Twickenham residents took themselves beyond the reach of all the absurdist metaphor and achieved instant auto-parodic status by complaining about the behaviour of drunken rugby fans.
An instant later, she regretted the metaphor, saying, "I don't mean to trivialize it, nor do I mean to cover it up". Handcuffed and wearing an orange jail uniform, Izaguirre appeared Wednesday in a San Francisco courtroom.
As it is, anyone seeing the fibreglass metaphors should, an instant after they recall the lines "Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?", find their spirits lifted by the cheerful colours, contours and themes created by the toad artists and think – why on earth not?
Rather, "Instant City" posits Karachi as a metaphor for the developing world, teetering between modernity and tradition, democracy and authoritarianism, East and West.
(Frank Thompson writes of Wayne's cinematic cold-war metaphor: "There isn't an instant in the film that corresponds to the historical event of 1836 in any way, except coincidentally").
It's characteristic of Bonnefoy that his faithful description of passing through the woods on a snowy evening also gives him the metaphor of a blank piece of paper in the instant before a poem fills it.
