A_ opened this issue on Apr 01, 2003 ยท 6 posts
Luiseach posted Wed, 02 April 2003 at 4:48 PM
There are several things I like about this piece immediately. One is its form. I like the way your line breaks and stanza breaks slow the reader down and give a sense slow-motion and out-of-time-ness to the events in the poem. (I like this very much, in fact.) I like the fact that you let us see the action, hear it with the narrator, that you use physical details to accomplish this--showing, not just telling. It pulls me into the poem instead of making me an observer from the outside only. I like the specificality (is that a word?) of the piece. It's a specific moment in a specific day. It doesn't try to be grandiose or "poetically impressive" with high-flown language, and because of it's plainspokenness and simplicity, its poignancy comes across with much more impact. Hurts, in fact. Good tone. As a reader, I do wonder who died. Up until the point of the line, "She's dead?", we've been given three characters: the speaker, the woman/girl coming home heartbroken, and the guy who broke her heart. I don't know who died, and while I may not need to know very much about the person, some hint or vague reference would help, I think. There were only two or three places where I saw your English as a second language being a factor at all, so lovely job! Lu