[Bruce McBirney]

What Nemo said so well about the emotional arc of the poem. For me, the movement from the childhood ritual between the son and his distant father, leading to the intimacy of the grown son's wife joining him in the ritual at the end, makes this one worth coming back to.

[Michael Cantor]

An interesting poem, but I don't think it works all that well as a sonnet. There's not much of a turn, not a strong sonnet structure. And, like Turner, I found the language overly dense for what the poem said. Finally, the "shrill orchestra of doors" and particularly "rotgut, with Clancy's dull-eyed boors" have been around the block too often, conceptually if not in those exact words. I have the sense that there's a strong poem here that is presently somewhat snarled in tangled language and the sonnet strictures.

[FOsen]

I agree that this one was engaging enough to draw me through the tangle of action and identities [father? not, evidently, the n's father; husband? so the childhood part is (npi) second-hand] and make we want to stay with it to figure it out. Only on rereading did I notice the loose meter and the hypermetrical last line. I think the langugage and imagery here are gorgeous - but I can't decide if I'd mark down for meter - I wouldn't for the process of coming to make full sense of it - that I enjoyed very much.

Frank

[John Beaton]

This is quite a good poem, perhaps a little shoehorned into sonnet form.

"Wealthy-waking" comes across to me as a forced construct but it brings in the touching idea of the son wishing his father a brighter future. This resonates well with the ending.

I feel distanced by the pov. Setting N up as the son's wife doesn't seem to bring much to the poem. "I join you, husband, in a rite of our own making" seems to try too hard to make N a part of the closing scene. Would it have worked better as a straight son-and-father interaction?

John

[Tim Murphy]

This poem is really growing on me. It's not easy to do a life or in this case, several lives, in fourteen lines. Multum in parvo. I find the love expressed in this poem to be fathomable but very, very deep. Hammers me where it hurts.

[Alex Pepple]

Powerful stuff here ... although the bulging contents feel straightjacketed into a sonnet -- it's already daring an escape into a longer poem and that additional final line (which feel like a vestigial appendage to this sonnet) may well be a prelude to the final escape!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Maryann Corbett]

Originally Posted by John Beaton

I feel distanced by the pov. Setting N up as the son's wife doesn't seem to bring much to the poem. "I join you, husband, in a rite of our own making" seems to try too hard to make N a part of the closing scene. Would it have worked better as a straight son-and-father interaction?

I disagree here. That the poem's I is the son's wife means it's through her consciousness that all this comes to us. The fact that she knows all this means that the son, her husband, has shared with her these tiny, intimate details of his young childhood. His sharing of them means that he has managed to become something other than the closed-off sort of man he might have learned to be from such a father, and turned the father's failure to respond into a source of closeness.

I think that's what earlier commenters refer to when they talk about the poem's "emotional arc"--its shift of focus from the father-son relationship out to the husband and wife.

I like this one a lot.

[Rose Kelleher]

Beautiful.

[Alan Wickes]

Well said Rose, I think this is my personal favourite of the sonnets posted so far. It's far from flawless. but I do keep coming back and it grows in intensity and power with repeated reading - a surefire sign of a special poem.

Alan

[Gail White]

Yes, it took me 9 lines to figure out what was going on here (thought at first the poet was giving money to a beggar) - Nonetheless, I like this one very much. It has a nice Irish sound to it, and I like the extra-long line at the end.