Hey there, Black! The third of your promised reviews from the KotGR contest has, at long last, arrived!
I want to start out by saying there are some places where the rhythm of this piece absolutely ROCKS. I love especially this passage:
Whisper whisper in the night,
you are losing a long lost fight,
I think it's the powerful single-syllable words in a triplet at the end of the second line of the couplet that drive it home. Like someone slapping their fist into their palm three times in a row, just driving that home. But Pinguini's right that your rhyme and rhythm are all over the place, which means these powerful moments are kind of drowned out by the other moments where your readers are stumbling to try to catch the flow.
You know how you hear music and you sometimes have to hear a few lines to catch on to the beat when it's complicated? Well, poetry has a rhythm like that, too. If it's easy and straight forward, we fall right into it, and it drives us along through the text. If it's always changing and switching directions, we can't get into it, and that leaves us more distanced from the text that we'd necessarily have to be, you know?
The other thing I'd like to see in an edit of this would be an attempt at removing some element of how vague it is. Right now, I'll be honest, I have no idea what this is about when I finish reading it. And no, I don't have to know the meaning of every single poem I read, but when I don't know the meaning, I personally can't really pull anything memorable away from it, and it doesn't move anything in me. For me, poetry's about hitting me somewhere, and is especially excellent if I remember it. So getting the actual meat of the meaning in there would be really helpful, I think!
Anyway, those are my suggestions. Hope they can be useful. If you have any questions or comments about my review, just let me know.
Good luck, and always keep writing!
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