ecargo22 Sep 2006

Okay--back again. I do like this one a lot! Your meter works great, and the imagery is strong enough that the meter is almost an afterthought for the reader (which I always think is a sign that a poem is working--the "strings" are invisible and you forget the puppets aren't really people, so to speak. Yeats and Seamus Heaney are great examples of that kind of mastery--I've been so blown away by their language, at times, that only later did I realize that the form is a rhyming sonnet or whatever). I only stumbled a few places reading this:

Are climes steep? I'd lose the parens here: "(and sloping glades of grain)" Maybe recast it so your sloping glades are steep or something.

"which turned from diamanté lens to drear
in clicking like an oaken farmhouse door." [not sure I get this--what turned? and what's "clicking" modifying?]

"-It was no stream of sun – but skewing cloud"

[replace weak phrases like "it was" with stronger constructs like "we lost the stream of sun, found skewing [?] cloud]--my replacement word choices are just illustrative; I'm not crazy about them either, but the point is that if you take passive, flaccid phrases like "it was" and make them more active and dynamic, it usually adds to the strength & vibrancy of the poem overall.

And no-one seemed to know quite how it came
to be so dark, or why it stayed so long [again, two "its" seems a lot and it's such an imprecise, nonreflective word here--I'd either recast this somehow or shorten the line and not worry too much about the syllable count]

"The landscape threatened violence that day-
as solar flowers threw their manes around [stronger, more threatening word than "threw" maybe? or maybe it's "flowers" that, er, throws me--I think the threat needs to be more implicitly reflected in this line; flowers just aren't threatening (unless they're creepy plant-things like bladderwort or Venus Flytrap.) ]

with total disregard; the screaming slaves [what are these? workers?]
in chain-gang rows.

I told you it had left a ribbon track- [nice--sort of made me think of cut to ribbons, because of the earlier mention of glass in heaps]

the scent of water in an earthen pitch,
and lizards leaping like a joyful king. [I like the lizard/king analogy (and, no, nothing to do with Mr. Morrison)--I've had the Roethke poem, To a Young Wife, in which he begins "My lizard, my lively writher" in my head for days, so I loved that you had a lizard here. I think "leaping" might be something else though--it's too remniscent of "leapin' lizards!" (maybe that's an American expression)

But still you watched the crackling, heavy orb,
like insects passed too soon for storm or grace

[what's like insects?]

an eye cast downwards – fractured morning ice
of hurricane and tempest’s broken tide.

Very cool. So many good lines and strong images in this! Good poem.