Published December 20, 2009
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
139,636 Literary Works • 672,636 Reviews
Nice job that poem is beautiful. Keep writing!
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'.
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
Thank you for all the kind and helpful words.
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.
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.
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.
White washed? But eggs are white. I don't get that one. Even less than the rest.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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:
Should be "rhythmically"
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