Hey Traves! Always a pleasure to see a review request from you. Consider this my customary warning that I am extremely rusty at reviewing and only somewhat of a poetry reviewer anyway (and most definitely cannot compete with @alliyah), and let's dive right in. (One extra caveat - I've never written a villanelle but know the form.)
My first thought is that both of your refrains are really strong and central to the theme. They tie the poem together well and I always felt re-focused whenever the poem returned to them. This was a big bonus. The image of broken-in shoes is easily my favorite in the poem because it captures a wanderer so well. My only quibble is that I would strongly prefer "the" to "an" in "dragging out an end that my time here knit," because something about "an" just feels ambiguous to me. It seems to suggest that the narrator has a lot of these endings in their life, which I don't think is what you intended. "The" also adds alliteration, which makes the line read more smoothly out loud.
I'm not quite sure how to feel about the flow of this poem. Line-by-line, it does not flow very smoothly, but because of the repetition of the villanelle form it still creates a rather unique cadence. In some ways, the disjointed flow creates a more disconnected feeling similar to what the narrator is experiencing. I enjoyed that.
As a note, although this poem is clearly about leaving, I would not have guessed that the narrator was leaving specifically their hometown. Although I look back and see lots of indicators that this town is one the narrator has lived in a long time and that leaving will leave a huge hole in their life, I couldn't make sense of many those clues on my first read, and wound up focusing more on images like the "next town's graces," which feel more transitional.
Okay, let's talk about what I couldn't make sense of at first, which was mostly these two lines:
An intense urge to mend a needless rift
made years ago ends in imagined embraces,
I think the narrator here, wishing he could make up with someone before leaving, is imagining that mending and the embraces that follow, but it's not actually happening. It took me until copy/pasting this quote and trying to summarize it that I figured that out; I think it's an artifact of the awkward sentence structure and lack of punctuation to guide the eye. "Ends" is also a verb that could apply to either the urge or the rift and I'm not sure which.
The old dog’s tail says something we won’t admit,
like moribund patients smiling with life’s last traces,
I really like this image, but it also threw me for a loop because you don't actually say what the dog's tail is doing or what that motion says that they won't admit. With the absence of one or the other, I could infer, but with the absence of both I have no idea. That being said, from the next line I'm getting the idea of inevitable end and fake politeness, and imagining family/friends keeping up an appearance of friendliness as they wish the narrator goodbye. This informs my reading of the two previous lines, but I'm still unsure if that implies the dog's tail is wagging, staying still, or doing something else entirely.
Similarly, suitcases full of memory is a great metaphor, but "memory-suitcases" is distractingly awkward.
I suppose my main takeaway is that I'm finding a lot of evocative images here to dig into upon re-read, many of which I missed or didn't appreciate on the first read through because of awkward sentence structure burying the subtleties. However, the structure and content of the poem is solid - each stanza presents a new concept/experience in conjunction with this theme of leaving, and they build on each other to create a compelling picture. Some lines of this poem - like "Broken-in shoes resist the urge to sit" and "I'll leave un-whole from this town, I'll admit," are honestly haunting, and have stayed in my brain long after I first read this piece two days ago. The rest just isn't there yet, and though I think focusing more on clarity and less on implication will help add enough information to those lines for the reader to understand them better, mostly it's going to be the effort of making lines rhyme while preserving clear sentence structure as much as possible.
All right, hopefully this is at least useful and not a "do it magically this way" review. I mostly wanted to break down my thought processes as I was reading this and where my barriers to understanding were. I didn't read any of the other reviews, so as to give you a fresh take. Let me know if you have any questions or want to discuss any of this further; it's late and I can feel my brain rapidly slipping, so I think I'll leave this here. Good luck with your redrafting!
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