Hi Susan
Deftly and effectively done. It’s hard to coax a proper story with incident, action and feeling out of a villanelle but you have succeeded.
One possible nit. S5L2 “My wife watches me guardedly, as though”. That makes three “my wife”s, and “wife” is also the end-rhyme in one of the repetends. I realise that the repetitions of my wife, my son, my father etc are deliberately obsessive. But in this line, if you were to replace “My” with “A” so that the line read “A wife who watches guardedly, as though” then it would add some distance between the protagonists and would underline Odysseus’s misery. (It would also conform better to IP. But I know you like to insert missteps into your poems)
Joe
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