Brandy

This poem was written about my beloved, deceased German Shepherd named Brandy who passed away some years ago. It is a heartfelt elegy that deals in my heartbreak over her death and my resentment towards not being there for her.
It was written when I was still in high school so it's not the greatest. It was one of my first poems.


As soft as the cotton growing in Daddy's field,
Eyes like two brown charms,
Never tarnished,
Somehow, always unblemished.
Like the handsome sunlight that hundreds of summer days were spent in,
Nails as sharp as the teeth barred at strangers,
Abuse took the tender love away from this world,
I brought it back to share,
Not for me, not for the world,
But for the free, beautiful being that I so genuinely adored.
To show to not only her, but to myself
That all people can love,
Like I loved.
Never torn, never broken,
It will live on,
Until the day I see my love,
On the other side,
Away from this hurt and abuse,
Because in death,
We all become our perfect selves.

Hi there. Lavvi in to review for you this time.

This was a bittersweet poem, but it sounds like you have some good memories about your dog. Here, let's get to our review.

To be frank, the poem bored me a little because of lack of a good vocabulary. The words you used (as descriptors and others) were quite simplistic and uninteresting. It didn't pull the reader in, like it should. However, when expanding your poetry vocabulary, I don't want you to go all out and use words that haven't been written down in one hundred and fifty years. Because then nobody will understand them.

I think you should also elaborate a little more about your dog. We can tell that you loved her very, very much, but maybe you could incorporate a funny and/or happy memory? Like playing fetch or she rolled in the mud for a long time or something. It would really help the audience relate to you, feel involved even though they didn't know this obviously awesome dog

Yours,
Lavvi

Hey there, Griffiths, and happy May Day!

I like what you have going on here, and I want to see this piece shine like the the ocean in moonlight. I'm going to be quick with this and talk to you about two main things that I see about this poem that can be drastically improved upon so that others can further help you. Let's talk about professionalism.

The first thing I want to bring your attention to is your use of a comma after each line. Now, I was raised in a town where there weren't exactly any poetry scholars, so I was never told about proper formatting. The thing is that, when you write a piece of poetry, you can basically take it two ways. Either:

1. Use punctuation correctly or
2. Don't use punctuation at all.

This seems pretty cut-and-dry, but understand that, no matter your punctuation, be intentional about it. Believe it or not, publishers and readers will more often than not be turned off by a lack of grammatical mastery.

The same can be said of capitalization. Another abused rule in poetry is that you do not have to capitalize the beginning of every line.

As a general rule of thumb, I typically try to write my poetry as if I were writing a very purple paragraph. I make the punctuation and capitalization flow properly, and as a result, my poetry ends up aesthetically pleasing to lovers of the English language.

So there's my rant about Punctuation and Capitalization. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

-Lumi

Hello there! I won't review this in detail since it's an old poem and sentimental at that. I'm sure you've grown and developed as a writer anyway so I'll just give you a few general thoughts that might in some way help your current poetry.

You should choose your language more carefully. The tone of this was gentle, thoughtful and just a little sad and I thought that worked quite well, but there weren't any interesting images or words for your reader to latch on to. Personal poems are often difficult to write because while the events will be very significant and important to you, they won't have the same meaning for your reader. So what you need to do is aim to share some of that emotion you feel and put them in your shoes, if only for a little while.

Alternatively, it might have been an idea to take a step back and write in third person instead of first. It may seem bizarre to suggest that you not be yourself in an event that happened to you, but it would give you a better idea of how the reader is seeing it and make it less self involved. Plus, you'd be able to paint the picture of the young girl from outside in. One of the troubles with first person is, unless the voice is very strong, it's often difficult to build any outward appearance for the persona and sometimes, indeed, even hard to know if they are male or female etc.

Well I'll leave it there for now. I'm sure this is just a poem you wanted to share to test the water and not much of what I say pertaining to this poem will be of use to you for others. But if you want a review on some more up-to-date work just let me know and I'd be happy to oblige

Heather xxx