Night

Image: Night by mjagiellicz

Now, I just wrote this in a slight daze. I myself am not sure of what in the world it's about. I apologize for the mess it's in right now.

--

The velvet darkness carves out lines of beauty
hacking up deep curves, rhythmically distorting.
A soft wrinkle of light laps into existence,
feathered fingers coax the night into open hands
shaggy jaws of ebony close around it.
Ever so delicate, a broken body.
A thread snipped with jagged claws,
the world falls on an edge, cracking.
A white wash egg.
Light emerges, creeping slowly
like a flicker of a candle, a hanging note.
Shades swallow it up with a hungry passion
for the dance to begin again.

Hey Kammie!

Beautiful poem, really nice! Your imagery is awesome, Kammie, it far surpasses anything I've attempted.

One thing I noticed is that you're kind of inconsistent with your capitalization. Sometimes you're following the traditional rule of capitalizing lines whether or not they follow a period, but other times you've used the more modern method of not capitalizing. So yeah, you might want to sort that out.

Also, a couple of spelling mistakes:

hacking up deep curves rhymthically, distorting views.

Should be "rhythmically"

A soft wrinkle of light laps into existance

Should be "existence"

Apart from that, I can't really fault this! I'm sure that it could use some tightening up at some points, but the best person to do that is really you. I just love your use of imagery, it always flows well and is just really well put together. I really enjoyed this, so well done!

~Amy

Hey Kamas! This was really lovely. Again, I'm rather rusty reviewing poetry, so I apologize if I don't give the most helpful suggestions. You had some nice images going for you here and I loved the language. I felt like you were going for an image here rather than a larger theme, so I'm going to review this in that context, okay? I really just have three nitpicks

shaggy jaws of ebony close around it
ever so delicate, a broken body
a thread snipped with jagged claws

All right, the phrases 'shaggy jaws' and 'jagged claws' are extremely similar; they rhyme almost perfectly but they are at opposite ends of lines separated by another line. I'm really not sure whether I like it or not. It sounds a little strange to me; it made me go back and reread what was being said. Take it how you will, but it stuck out to me.

I'm not a fan of the repetition of the word 'darkness'. You use such vivid words that 'darkness' feels weak unless it is bolstered by the power of repetition and other devices. If the first and last lines contained that word, I would have an easier time with it, but with it being in the first line and second to last line it struck me as a little weak. I would suggest either changing that word or finding ways to add a little more power to it.

Last thing--you use the article 'a/an' a lot here, so much that it started to bother me. Maybe it's just me and my strange mind, but you might want to play with rhythm and mess with some of those articles.

All in all, I like this! Very lovely piece. Your poetry makes me want to stick my head back in the poetry forums more often. Nice job and keep up the great work. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

feathered fingers coax the night into open hands
shaggy jaws of ebony close around it

I think of this as the sky being coaxed into someone's hand, but then suddenly jaws close around the sky? It seems as if your point changed from hands to a mouth possibly.

the world falls on an edge cracking
like a white wash egg

Since you said cracking and then egg, I think of the egg cracking, so you should maybe include something like that. I added it in bold.

Overall:
That was very well written! Despite the fact that you came up with it in a daze, not really considering any specific topic to go along with it, I could see the subject of this piece. It's one of those rare pieces of work that can actually be put into different points of views. Various readers have various opinions on this piece, making it easy to relate to anything on their mind, as the time of reading.
Awesome job Kamas! Keep up the good work.
-JD

What I didn't like was that there was little smooth transition from the darkness to the light and all the things inbetween...
What I did like was that it slowly moved through the poem and it sort of helped create a time, of how long it takes for all of this to go...

Also it seems to just drop near the end...
Other than that it was okay... You're imagry was kinda effective... Better than what I have been reading... Which isn't much but still!

Silented1.

Kamas--this is awesome. Really, really awesome. Besides what everyone's said (existance is existence, rhymthically is rhythmically), it's literally perfect. I can't find any faults here. The imagery is just wonderful, superb.
No more critiques as this is really flawless, or close. It's a poem I would read and expect to come from a professional; like the hand-outs one of my teachers used to give us.
Really good!
-Mizzle

The velvet darkness carves out lines of beauty
hacking up deep curves, rhythmically distorting.

The darkness carves out lines of beauty, or has lines of beauty carved in it? The latter makes slightly more sense to me but frankly I have no idea what your intent was. The trouble here, which is the same trouble that the poem as a whole has, is that it is a gorgeous string of words that is difficult if not impossible to attach to an image. From the title the reader might justly expected a description of some aspect of night, whether the physical or the metaphysical; what we get, instead, seems more like a poem written most of it for the aesthetics of the language itself, with nightlike adjectives and metaphors that could possibly represent dawn thrown in.

A soft wrinkle of light laps into existence,
feathered fingers coax the night into open hands
shaggy jaws of ebony close around it.

Jaws of ebony close around the night? How would you tell? Or do you mean the night's jaws are closing around the hands of the light that precedes dawn? Clarify that, or cut it, depending which you meant, because the former just does not work.

Ever so delicate, a broken body.
A thread snipped with jagged claws,
the world falls on an edge, cracking.

Because the thread is snipped, the world falls, I presume. So put in an 'and' between claws and the world. What is so delicate? The light? That's what I want it to be, but it could as easily be the darkness, and-- and my poor little brain is confused.

A white wash egg.

White washed? But eggs are white. I don't get that one. Even less than the rest.

Light emerges, creeping slowly
like a flicker of a candle, a hanging note.
Shades swallow it up with a hungry passion
for the dance to begin again.

The three penultimate lines are nice and clear, but then the last line just throws me back into the earlier tangle of question marks. Did the sun actually just rise and set? Do the shadows represent miniature night-times? Or are you discussing some cycle of lightening and darkening that precedes the final rising of the sun? You just-- you don't give us enough. This poem needs more context, it needs a concrete foundation under the fair flights of fancy. Without that it hovers a bare inch above the level of nonsense. You have such marvellous ideas, and by cramming them in without including any of their mundane cousins you strangle them. (Yeah, I dunno how to come up with an actual analogy that would describe the same process either. *is made of fail*)

At least, for audience of a certain intellectual caliber, i.e., me, that's what you need to add. Solid stuff. Bones to hang the skin over.

Thank you for all the kind and helpful words.

Hey Kamas! You've got some awesome images here but the lines feel jerky and disconnected in places, you might want to smooth that out. Also, I think some of the lines could be made slightly more poetic just by changing the syntax a little. With your first you could reverse it so that it read something like, 'Beauty lines carved with velvet darkness'.

The velvet darkness carves out lines of beauty
hacking up deep curves, rhythmically distorting. [Maybe link this line to the next? You could have '...distorting but then!']
A soft wrinkle of light laps into existence,
feathered fingers coax the night into open hands
shaggy jaws of ebony close around it. [I don't like this line, feels repetetive and shaggy is a little too colloquial. Maybe just change shaggy and ebony? A harsher sounding word like Frayed or rugged might be better. Maybe broken? Ebony could be lots of other things like '...the jaws of ink...' etc.]
Ever so delicate, a broken body.
A thread snipped with jagged claws,
the world falls on an edge, cracking.
A white wash egg. [I like this line but I think I'd maybe like to see in incorporated more.]
Light emerges, creeping slowly
like a flicker of a candle, a hanging note. [Lovely line.]
Shades swallow it up with a hungry passion
for the dance to begin again.

I'm not sure about ending on the whole theme of the dance, that's not very original. There are a lot of other ways to describe the cycle of day and night and I'd like to see you use another.

Hope this helps a little!

Heather xx

Nice job that poem is beautiful. Keep writing!