I wasn't enthralled by this one - I'm not a flower person to begin with, and I don't believe that poems should require googling to be fully appreciated - there was too much that depended on specialized knowledge.
On the other hand, there's some gutsy and admirable stuff going on with the sonics that works very well with the voice and content of the poem The meter is very loose, and difficult to pin down because of ellisions, substitutions and pronunciation variants, but there seems to be a wonderful bouquet of pentamteter and some hex, mixed with headless or trochaic lines - and it's always interesting and never clangs. Good music.
The repeats on L4, L8 and L14 were also kind of gutsy for a sonnet - throwing away two lines, in effect, to get an effect - but I think the writer got away with it. There's a mini-villanelle feeling here. Also - and this doesn't work for me - a reminder of Thomas's I See the Boys of Summer.
Last edited by Michael Cantor; 04-01-2009 at 08:18 AM.
|