Comments by Distinguished Guest Amit Majmudar:
This sonnet shows us the potential of the straightforward, no-hijinx sonnet. Or rather, the hijinx are all in the obedience.
The execution of this sonnet—I know, a tasteless pun—gains force from the identification with the one who inflicts the violence. Almost all novels and poems that deal with political violence have a knee-jerk tendency to enter, and draw the reader into, the perspective of the victim. Here, it is almost a third party, or some cringing courtier or minister or lackey who secretly loathes and fears the power to which he kowtows (I’m letting my imagination go).
“The reappearance alive of the disappeared” has an appropriately Orwellian flavor to it. The epigraph is well-used; it allows the sonnet to dispense with scene-setting and place-statement—the stuff of many a novelist’s Chapter One—and cut to the image at its crux (no more puns, I promise). The verse can travel light this way. This is the kind of transparent poetry where the versecraft disappears and the thing described takes precedence.
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