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Unread 04-20-2020, 08:26 AM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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Unsurprisingly, given that I started the thread, I could not disagree more. (Well, I agree about the high level of craft.)

In "Dank fens of cedar," the poem itself is dank and dark and lush, and it's so sensuous I can almost feel myself there, feeling my loves and vows "grow green in your gray shadows." Likewise, the last poem captures perfectly a mood I know only too well: it's an inverted Emersonian rapture ("still but myself I find").

On a purely technical level, I enjoy his varied rhyme schemes, which splash across the expected octet/sestet division (as well as the quatrain/quatrain/quatrain/couplet division) in effective ways. I wish his experimentation on this front had become the "American" sonnet, as recognizable as the Petrarchan and Shakespearian.
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