Now that the Bake-off has officially ended, I hope it will not appear ungracious if I offer a few reservations about these two poems, despite their obvious successes.
I don't think Wakefield's sonnet has offered any particular insight (though I too applaud that magical last line) into a pretty commonplace idea, unless maybe having something described as a "weekend slip," a youthful "lapse" lead (rather unconvincingly?) to eventual encores qualifies. L5 seems to me particularly tortured to get the present tense verb for rhyme, and the transition from "then" to "now" seems a bit clumsy; wouldn't lines 6-8 more appropriately come later?
"French Braids" is attractive and intriguing, but I think it might have profitted from some other word than "counsels" (L5), which disrupts the rhythm at that point without grammatical or dramatic justification. "Destruction" (L7) also seems a bit strong for the tone and context. I might have been tempted to save "undoing" for here, especially since "It's wary of undoing just for fun" carries such suggestive overtones not inappropriate for this context, and found a different rhyme pair for "viewing/undoing," which seems to me a bit clumsy and rhyme-driven.
Rhina's explanation of the "grammatically impossible 'between each braid'" -- "it [shows] how language has to be used inventively to do a little more than it can," preferring "lovely confusion" to "verbal logic" -- is both ingenious and apt, and I heartily concur. It also illustrates how a poem benefits from our understandable tendency to be particularly generous in making a case for work by those we know and like.
Cheers,
Jan
|