Young Writers Society

Ohh, I love this!

This is really amazing!

I love the description and how it all flows...

I really like it, I can't find anything wrong, spelling wise...

Well,

Happy Review Day 2013 June

Thanks,

pegasusgirl2

Okay, so you had a really interesting premise here. The words that stick out to me most are the words onyx, and then that passage where he's looking up at the sky and wishing she'd come back. I don't know if that means she died, or he's just looking to an object in his life that is a constant and also in hers. I'm not clear on that, so that would definitely need some attention.

The biggest problem for me is that everyone wants to describe the person they love with the highest beauty. In doing so, we all have rose lips and gleaming giggles, and we're all slender and sexy and draped in cloth that hints at our physical being. Because of that, it's hard to read this poem eagerly. It could be anyone. It's not just the character who was given the locket, it's every character who has ever been loved, and that makes it not as interesting to read, because we could just go read some other poem for the same message.

I think what you need to do is focus on what you kind of brought into the spotlight without expanding on it: the locket. You say, in that ending stanza: I gave it to you. But you give us NOTHING else! What does she keep in it?! Does she wear it every day? Why does he notice it, just because it's a material object that he gave to her and she's wearing it as a sign of belonging to him? Expand on this element that took your attention and see if you can get away from the story everyone else can tell.

Good luck!
PM me if you have any questions or comments about my review, please.
And above all, keep writing!

Hey TranscendingIllusion!

Now, I love your experiment with sounds here. So, slender seductive / balanced delicate -- these soft /e/ sounds in close proximity do provide a nice effect in this piece.

Now, I do have to agree with what Pengu was saying, the poem ran a bit long. I don't think it's a matter of people not liking it or trying to skim through it in that sense - I think it's because you have two disparing elements in this piece. One element is the short line, that makes for quick reading. Short lines are all about brevity, lightness, and crispness. People tend to read through them fast, so you want to be able to get straight-to-the-point when you're writing in short lines, because we're reading it faster. The other thing is the length of the poem itself -- so it's akin to watching an action movie that has scene after scene after scene of fast actiony clips -- but having the movie be 4-5 hours long o.o it's two conflicting elements. I'm not saying that every poem with short lines should only be a certain number of lines long -- if you can make a long poem feel short with precision and economy of words, then people will hardly feel the length at all.

The description here, while beautiful, and you do point a lot of this symmetrically white, softer than petals, gold, silk, etc. all of these words all add up to our minds in a culmination of: beauty, beauty, beauty -- so midway through, we get it already. This woman is beautiful -- but make us care for this woman.

We're not going to care about her appearance one fraction of a second, unless you first describe why this means so much to the speaker, or you know...the woman's personality would be a start.

All of this to say I love you at the end is a bit anticlimatic. It could be a powerful piece, but sometimes a poet needs to roll up his/her sleeves and be willing to cut their darlings.

I hope this helps.

~ as always, Audy

Hi there! Paolamarie here, you can call me Paola. this is an amazing poem is so romantic and very sweet! is also very good in the way that you use your imagery words. Every line I read was amuzing and very enchanting. I found this poem to be a really nice piece of work that you have made I really liked it but other than that it was nicely done

Hola, Transcending!

Yay for writing poetry, I can see that you've put a whole lot of feeling behind your narrator's emotions and the devotion they have for this person is really very clear. I like that you've got a good handle on including imagery in poetry - imagery is often what keeps your readers interested in the action of the poem. (there isn't always much action in poetry, which is why imagery becomes super important).

This poem, however, is really too long. I say it's too long because about halfway through I kept wondering when it was going to end, and when it kept going for ages I skipped to the bottom and was like "oh man" because, it's super long and gets really boring in the middle. What you need to do, in the case of your readers potentially finding the poem uninteresting in the middle, is condense what you're saying. This is where that imagery bites you a bit, I'm sad to say. You do a lot of describing here and it gets really repetitive really quickly and I can tell you I was over it super quickly. The images you have are pretty good, although I don't know about perfect hips and such, but they have conviction and that's pretty key. What I suggest you do at this point is remove any description which isn't absolutely necessary to the image you're giving us. As an example your fourth stanza is pretty much unnecessary. That's pretty harsh to say, I know, but we really, really don't need onyx pupils and turquoise oceans of irises, describing eyes in this way is pretty assuredly cliched. Then the running in the wood is pretty uninteresting, and the important bits are that the narrator is looking down and seeing the joy reflecting back, isn't it? We're being distracted from the good stuff by all of the over the top imagery going on. Once you edit that back a bit, your whole poem will take on a new sense of purpose which will really change how your reader approaches the poem.

I know that all looks pretty scary, so I'm basically saying; take out some of the imagery, only keep the really good, interesting bits. See what comes out. Always remember that you never have to keep an edit of a poem, and that you also only have to take the advice you want. I hope this helps, you have a good poem to look forward to.

Please feel free to hit me up with any questions, queries or just to chat.

- Penguin.

Beautiful. I was totally moved by this poem, and I can imagine the girl the narrator loves.

I love it!

- Wonder