AUTHOR’S NOTE The poetic form used in these pages is one invented by Raymond Queneau in his 1975 book Morale élémentaire; it has come to be called the ‘elementary morality’ after this volume, or, after its inventor, the ‘quennet’, as it has one more line than a sonnet. David Bellos summarises the poem’s structure in the following way: Three two-line stanzas, line 1 of each consisting of three phrases and line 2 of one phrase, each phrase formed by a noun-adjective pair followed by Seven lines of at least two and not more than seven syllables followed by One two-line stanza conforming to the same constraint as at the start. Rhymes, assonances, and repetitions between phrases and the ‘middle lines’ (what Queneau called the ‘refrain’) are not regulated but positively encouraged. ‘Elementary Estuaries’, a sequence based around estuary walks in Essex carried out between January 2006 and January 2007, at the rate of approximately one per week, uses Queneau’s form relatively unchanged: the poem’s appearance on the page, suggestive of receding flatnesses, seems perfectly adapted to the depiction of estuarine landscapes. The first set of two-line stanzas suggests the distant horizon, the refrain the watery middle-ground, the final two-line stanza the flat, and often muddy, foreground. Modelled, in part, on Georges Perec’s Les Lieux project, for which he planned to visit twelve places in Paris twelve times each, ten estuaries, from the Stour to the Thames, were visited on five occasions each, giving a total of fifty poems – but the place of composition, for all these pieces were completed in the field, has not been attached to individual poems. Each piece, rather, remains untitled, detached from place, enabling the abstraction that Queneau’s form can create to come into play. Poetry, since romanticism, has tended to privilege 141 | AUTHOR’S NOTE