Y'ola. Here to review as requested~
Before I begin, it's admirable that you wrote this, in light of what happened last week. Most of the time, pain is difficult to put into words, the kind of pain that we see and feel almost every day--no matter where it happens, no matter who it happens to. What I like about this poem is that even though it's written for the Paris terror attack, it's relatable. It doesn't pinpoint an exact place or time: it talks about aftermaths, and I've always felt the aftermath is just as important as the happening itself. The poet's tone is absolutely lovely in this piece; it sounds haggard and resigned and damp, which is what you were going for, yes?
For the rest of the review, I will speak detachedly, talking about the construction of the poem as a whole.
1) Your tenses have a tendency to jump around quite a bit. In line 4, 'had been removed' would read better as 'has been removed'. I also feel like the 's' in 'stained' should not be capitalised? I'm not bothered by the lack of punctuation, because it seems you've used capitalisation to guide your readers' internal sense of rhythm, but the break between 'night' and 'stained' does not work for me. I also had to read that line twice--is the poet stained with blood or are the streets stained with blood? It's not very clear.
2) In stanza two, the poet's thoughts aren't conveyed very clearly. It's not that poetry is always clear--sometimes ambiguity works well for the effect the writer is trying to create. In this case, though, it's just that all the images are clashing together, and the lack of punctuation doesn't really work in a stream-of-consciousness way as much as it creates confusion. I think it might help if the poem detached itself slightly from the poet at this point, so we don't focus on the poet 'straining (their) ears' or any of those grounded actions. Because the scene is surreal, right? Because it's so hard to believe. I'd rather focus on the actions themselves, on 'the echoes of screams' /doing/ something to the narrator. Right now, your images are toppling into one another: You shift from straining ears to catching echoing screams to those screams having escaped from lips to those lips having sung songs prior to this. It's a lot to take in. Maybe this is intentional, but it confuses the reader a tad.
3) Even in poetry, it's good to avoid passivity. Maybe passivity works in some situations, but in this situation, where the narrator's mind is active and the rest of their actions focus on the happening, even that which has already happened must make it into the present. 'An echo of a scream dances through the air;//my ears reach out to catch it--it is mocking, having escaped//from lips previously gasping lyrics of (*insert here*)' is an example of how you can make the situation active. The narrator is the observer of the aftermath. They're just a conch and the ocean around them holds more importance.
I like how you've gotten the 'numb' feeling across, but I think focussing on the numbness as a whole paves the way to monotony later on in the piece. It fiddles with our feelings well in the first stanza, but by the end of the first stanza the reader is expecting suppressed rage and raw, aching feelings, too. So mix it up a little. There's potential here; you can do a lot with this.
One more thing: This is a very raw, very honest piece, and in that it's absolutely lovely. It is also, however, a little too prosaic--and I don't mean to be harsh at all when I say this. It's your style. It's how you choose to convey the images you build. It does feel like something is impeding the flow, though, like there's this almost-tangible barrier between the reader and the poem, and that might be because we hardly ever depart from the narrator to the scene itself. Try making this a little less prose-ish. Jumble up your sentences, play with the words, be unconventional. Stuff sentence structure--it's not the most important thing.
My advice: Write. Keep writing. Write this in different ways, play with all the emotions, make this more than the standing tribute it is. I like how the 'I walk' balances the moment, how it points to moving forward, yet the reader is always wondering who exactly the narrator is. What have they lost? How has this changed them? Where are they walking to and what is their destination? Where is the u-turn, the bend in the road that they've encountered, and how has it changed /them/? The work focusses on walking, on moving forward. There's a shred of optimism here, and I think you could exploit this, get the feeling across in a manner that is more poignant and more /visible/.
So where is the narrator walking to?
PM me if you have any questions. Keep writing! Keep up the great work, Writ!
Hope this helped.
~Pomp x
Good job. I'm actually glad you got to it first. I'm not sure if my poem would have been that good.
Points: 27
Reviews: 396
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