[Mark McDonnell]

Hi David!

I agree, unsurprisingly, with Paula about your "voice". That the language sounds so utterly natural, even when working with relatively short lines and rhyming couplets, is a testament to the voice that you have developed in your poems. Nothing sounds forced or out of place, to me at least. It sounds like eavesdropping on a whispered inner monologue as the speaker sits with a dusty box from the attic.

Forgive me for "critting the critters" but I'm gonna. I see the reference to the CV as a metaphorical CV that you explain in the next phrase: "the uncertain biography / I have of her".

I like the Manx phrase. It's beautiful. It made me say "tralala", like Diane Keaton la-di-da ing. Little bits of local colour like this are hardly a challenge in the days of google, it takes two seconds. It's nice to do a bit of detective work if a poem has grabbed you enough to want to. Making the reader do that even fits thematically! Interactive poetry!

Keep "A place obscure". The inversion gives the slightest tinge of tongue-in-cheek gothic mystery, which seems entirely appropriate.

By the time I got to "the uncertain biography", I found myself slightly stressing "un" to give "the UNCERtain biOGraPHY" which felt good enough to make it tet for my purposes. The slow creep of the poem up to that point made this reading feel natural to me.

So. I think I agree with Matt about the full stop in the last line. Other than that, there's nothing I would change about this.

Mark

Edit: reading again, one line did strike me as sounding like trimeter and so feeling a little rushed. "It was somewhere she taught, the Dhoor", I read as "It was somewhere she taught, the Dhoor". Stressing "was" doesn't feel right and neither does making "somewhere" a spondee. What about adding a "that"? And then if you don't want the repeated "that" in the next line, make a little change, e.g

It was somewhere that she taught, the Dhoor.
I thought there might be traa dy liooar,

Possibly?