Read «Not This» for a plot or a message and it slips through your fingers, which seems to be the point. The poem gives no clues about where or why it was written, so the evidence is the page itself. What it dramatises is language in the act of going slightly wrong. Words appear, bend into near-twins of themselves, and finally turn into physical clutter. The title works as a refusal: whatever you think the poem is about, it says, not this.
The opening pair of lines sets up the trick. "Solar electricity" is a clean, technical phrase, all sunlight and power. Then comes "named appears," a fragment with no clear subject. It could mean that something named comes into view, or that naming itself is what appears. The grammar can't settle, and the poem moves on without helping. The idea is that language summons things, but what arrives here is a verb with nothing attached to it.
The second stanza is where sound takes charge. "Piars peals pairs" begins with a word that doesn't exist. "Piars" sits between "pairs," "pears" and "piers," and since "pairs" is an anagram of it, the line reads like letters being shuffled on a table. "Peals" (as of bells) and "peels" (as of fruit) sound alike but mean different things. The next line, "appear apple peels," echoes the earlier "appears" and drops its final s. Its words also seem to grow out of one another: "appear" and "apple" share their opening letters, and "apple peels" lands on the "peels" the previous line had already planted. There is no end rhyme, but there is a constant internal chiming, a tongue-twister rhythm of short words with hard p's popping like bubble wrap. Meaning is clearly being made from sound here, and the fruit imagery (pears, apple peels) feels like a by-product of the sound, not a topic.
Then the poem changes texture. "Sifting through / the polystyrene" brings in a concrete image, and a faintly comic, unglamorous one. Polystyrene is packing material, the stuff that surrounds an object without being the object. Looking at the poem's overall shape, that seems apt: the reader is digging through the packaging of language for something solid. What turns up is "a grey baton," which could be a conductor's stick or a relay runner's. A conductor would fit the stanza before, where the words behave like notes being cued. A relay baton would suggest meaning being handed on and never quite delivered. The poem doesn't choose.
The last lines are the strangest. "The props their / deadpan" suggests a stage, with props as theatre furniture, though "props" can also mean supports. The line break after "their" leaves the possessive hanging, waiting for a noun, and "deadpan" arrives alone on the final line, flat and expressionless. The form acts out its own last word. There is no full stop, so the poem stops without concluding, as if the props simply keep their straight faces while we look for the joke.
Across all three stanzas the p sounds keep returning: "piars," "peals," "pairs," "appear," "apple," "peels," "polystyrene," "props," "deadpan." That thread of plosive consonants holds the poem together more firmly than any sentence does. The line lengths shrink and stretch unpredictably, which keeps the reading pace jerky and alert.
The poem is significant for what it asks you to do. Most poems you meet at school offer a situation to interpret. This one makes you notice that words are built from letters and sounds before they are messages, and that a word can sound right and still mean nothing. Because it withholds easy sense, you become the one sifting through the polystyrene, deciding what counts as the object and what is only packing. Whether you end up with a theme about naming, performance or artificial materials, the poem has made you watch how meaning gets assembled, and how fragile it is. That is a good reason to read it slowly, aloud, more than once.