What We Were

I'm flattered, but there are other ways of expressing your undying love for me.

Spoiler

Note: You misspelled "compliment".

loath ...a

"Loath" without the "e" is adjective while "loathe" with the "e" is the verb.

the ... graze

I'm assuming you mean "graze" as in "pasture" here.

gold,...eyes

Comma + dash = why?

we ...safe

What is it? The moat or the souls? I'm guessing souls as moats provide protection rather than receive it, in which case, "it" should be "they".

I don't understand why the first and second-last stanzas are formatted the way they are, and it bugs me, especially since some parts of the formatting make sense, such as "compresssssed stars ((()))". But the rest of the punctuation and line breaks break my brain even more than it's already broken. I'm not sure if that was intentional, but it did make the first stanza quite intimidating to read and make sense of.

I did enjoy the body of the poem though, and I liked the recurring images and how you fluidly transitioned between them, though you seemed to switch between apple and peach for the same basic symbol, which I found a bit odd. I think sticking with just peach would work better.

And so concludes my rather unhelpful review.

He didn't misspell complement, actually.

Hey Gal, here as promised. I'm a bit rusty with poetry, but we'll see what we can do!

I like the first and last stanzas, actually, despite all logic screaming at me not to. I'm not sure what effect exactly you were hoping to achieve, but I envisioned this devil-speaker shivering profusely as if trying to keep himself from fragmenting into a million different shards or stars or nebulae. Some of the quirks I find a bit overkill, though-- the apostrophe after feed, the mY, and the two apostrophes in fighting. It begins to feel gimmicky, heaven forbid.

t...t

You do realize that, disregarding the line break, you spelled "heavenly" as "heaveenly", right? I'd take that first "e" off. It's much smoother for readers to see

t...t

than what you have, because we alter the vowel-sound in our mind's-ear to say "heave" and then trying to match that with "enly"...you get my drift.

i...n -

Didn't really like this either. It's very wordy, but without a good reason-- there's no imagery and the blatant rhyme with "moon" is distracting.

a...f

But the internal rhyme here is awesome.

Not sure why you threw "necessarily" in-- it's a very conversational word that doesn't fit with the poeticalness (is that even a word?) of everything around it, and it doesn't even have a meaning in this context either.

A...k,

"Wet" here is superfluous and kind of taints the image for me.

t...e -"

Is this where the devil's dialogue ends? Because it doesn't feel like a shift after this. You put a quotation mark in the beginning, before "Hi, I'm the devil" and I keep waiting for you to close the dialogue, but when you finally do, it doesn't feel like a transition. If that makes any sense. If you don't mean for this character/entity/thing to be speaking, then just don't put the quotation mark. If you do, you have to differentiate.

That's about it. I liked this a lot-- you're telling a story here, and your images actually connect, most of the time, which is ALL I ASK GOSHDARNIT. I agree with Kyll that you fluctuate between the peach and apple symbol-- if they're not the same thing, then that needs some clarification. I really enjoyed the sense of thrill and excitement in the second to last stanza, the escape one; it's a perspective you don't often see in the Eden story. Most of my issues here were with one word, one image, one phrase-- sometimes I think you're trying to cram too much into too little space, like someone at an all-you-can-eat buffet stuffing their face so they can get their money's worth. So I say, chill. You're getting your money's worth, don't worry, and weird unconnected words/images thrown in there arbitrarily are only diluting the awesomeness of the important parts.

Also, this did more than justice as a complement-- and a compliment --to Kamas's What We Are. Her poems were very heavily influenced by you and Kylan at some point, but she's found a happy medium and I can definitely distinguish her poetic voice now. That's not entirely relevant here, I know, but I have the two poems open beside each other and they play off of each other quite well. I'd love to see you two collaborate on a poem sometime.

Anyway, good job. I like this one a good deal more than some of your most recent ones. like omg ur the bestetz gallywally!!!1

~Evi

Heya Gal.

If you've ever seen any of my poetry reviews, you'll know that I rather suck at them, but hey, I'll see if I can help you out with this at all. If you have any questions or anything after this review, just le me know. I'd be happy enough to clear anything up for you.

This probably has something to do with my complete lack of poetry knowledge, but nonetheless, I will mention it anyway. In some parts, I wasn't overly keen on the structure/format of this poem. I did like most parts, but I don't know... I found that some of the lines you have here don't really work all that well. Hmmm... I think it's the line breaks that I'm not too keen on. Take this, for example:

transgressions ...my

I'm not keen on how you split the word in half here. This is more of a personal taste thing, to be honest, but I just thought I'd mention that some of the poems formatting seems a little... off? to me. In the end, it's your poem, so I suppose the structure/formatting of it is up to you. Besides, I have a weird taste when it comes to the layout of things.

To be honest, I think that's about it.... You write to skilfully. Write something bad for me? Yeah? Oh, but I do have to agree with something that Evi said. Sometimes it can feel like your'e trying to cram too much stuff into a stanza... and the overall poem actually. As cliché as it is, sometimes less is more. Obviously, I don't want you to put everything bluntly and in a horribly boring fashion, but don't feel like you have to cram a load of stuff in. I'm not sure if that makes sense... but pretend it does.

Yup. This review is short and pretty pointless. Seriously... write something bad. You has 2 many skillz.

Keep writing,

xoxo Skins

Gale, let’s divide this into two segments. Now, there is the part that succeeds as a poem, and there’s the part that fails as a poem, yet could serve as an interesting HTML code. But Gale, we’re not writing HTML code here, and the formatting in the first and last stanzas is a superfluous hindrance. You have good enough content in the meat of this poem to satiate the absence of your over-formatting. Flow takes priority over gimmicks in my book, and you’ve missed that. Particular attention should be given to your lines:

transgressions ...
scars.

You just miss the target on these, to be honest.

You don’t need praise for your imagery because you should understand your prowess by now, as it remains titanium-solid throughout. Note that my personal favorite is in the first stanza, among the parenthetical holocaust you have going on: “I walked into the snakehead realm, engraved on the helm of the baked lead crux of supermassive snarls in the sky[.]”

You enter the bulk of the poem with a voice that clashes against the remaining eloquence of the Devil’s words.

”Hi... devil.

See, after this line, you enter this verbose portrait of a thousand grand things, and that makes the simplicity of his introduction overwhelmingly disappointing. However, I’m thoroughly impressed with the heavy, full voice you gave him. See, once you overcome that slip in the introduction, everything becomes so fluid and alive that it’s rather intoxic—right. No more praise.

The stanza that boasts its need for improvement is your little gem, "'I could trace…fight the maze –'“

Give some thought to the accuracy of what you address; also consider removing the Pandora cliché. Even before I started reading this, I expected it, and you brought it to the table. Also, I’m not sure how much of a fan I am of your ending the devil’s dialog in this stanza. See, you end the voice here, but continue the narrative in the next stanza. The problem with that is that you don’t have the set up to do so, so your narrative of your “but ‘Higher…nothing of all, to –“ may as well be falling from a skyscraper in New York.

My final (right, this is a fail review) piece of advice is not to try so hard, Gale. Your inner stanzas are beautiful (albeit verbose at times), but where it’s very clear that you had an average stanza, you fell back on gimmicks to make yourself shine.

Don’t do that.

Your skill should be enough as itself.

PM me if you have any questions/comments (but by no means do you have to reciprocate this review)

-Lumi