This is very, very good, but it could be a bit better. Comma definitely needed at end of L2. I'm also not wild about "As though they were alive and well again." L3 could easily be reworded to avoid the cliche "alive and well," and also avoid the distracting suggestion (later contradicted by "connecting every face and name") that the protagonist actually thinks that they are "alive and well": "And one by one those heroes live again" or some such.
I liked the end-stopping of the central catalog of obligatory social interactions, and thought that checklist might feel even more perfunctory with some headless lines: "Birthday gifts are opened, put away./ Children, bored now, scuffle on the floor."
Even if those lines aren't decapitated, I'd like to see "Old Matriarch" made headless, to get rid of the redundant "Old". The honorific would have more majesty unadorned.
As for the turn--what if, instead of looking for a single volta-hinged gate to divide the sonnet's front yard from its back yard, we just look for the front yard and back yards themselves? In that case, the more private back yard would definitely be lines 1-3 and 11-14 of the sonnet, and the public front yard would be lines 4-10. The volta is still the gate between the two, but we go through it twice, starting and ending in the more intimate back yard. As is appropriate, in a poem about memory.
Last edited by Julie Steiner; 04-15-2011 at 10:23 PM.
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