[James Midgley]

Hey Matt,

I'm not entirely sure what to suggest with this -- because I've flip-flopped over it for the last little while.

It takes an enormous risk -- because until the final line, the poem really pretty much reads as if it believes what it's saying. I think it's that risk that made me stop to comment on it -- the risk is what I find impressive here, what I really enjoyed (if enjoyed is right).

That said, when I began to dig into the poem with that moment put aside, I began to sort of wonder what was left. That is to say -- everything about the poem, at least for me, seems to hinge entirely on that complete shift of tone. What comes before the volta (too light a term, here) isn't without its 'pleasures' -- the rhythm is well handled, the rhymes arrive with that pleasing sense of inevitability, and the sound-patterning works (maybe a little too hard on L3) -- but it doesn't do much imaginative leaping beyond the vile stereotypes it's illustrating (because it probably can't within this setup).

I also begin to have doubts about the final line -- though it's doing exactly the right sort of work. Even on a topic like this, which clearly has much in common with the caricaturing of the underclasses and therefore also the holocaust, the "showers" arrives as both shocking and glib at the same time. Like the ur-placeholder for this sort of thing. It doesn't completely conceptually creak -- one can imagine showering off a pig, after all (and all jokes aside) or prisoners, say. But it's hard to get past.

I think I may need to spend a little more time thinking about the poem -- but these are my first reactions to it -- and a great deal of this poem is very evidently about first reactions. And I hope these ones are of some use.

Cheers