Quote:
Originally Posted by James Midgley
Though I see the nightingale's gesture-to-the-imagination as redemption, rather than levelling it alongside the other banalities.
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I agree with this. I think the last line is a gesture, but a genuinely meaningful one, albeit in tension with a reflexive/protective irony.
Another poem from the book is about a dog from a puppy mill which she couldn't quite bring herself to adopt. Towards the end of the poem, the dog becomes a metaphor for poetry ("As I drove away, her borders dissolved. / She dispersed herself across the landscape like mist.")
It ends:
"At age ten, I turned away from tenderness.
I remember the moment. A flipping of a switch.
My house is a cold mess except for that thing in the corner.
Poetry, that snarling, flaming bitch."
So poetry is the dog she has turned away from, rejected - yet it lives with her anyway and aggressively illuminates and warms her house.