adularesence

Hello. Here as requested.

The opening of this reads like 3 different people wrote it. The ideas jump around from listening to altars to sailing around the world in the span of three lines, never touching on those ideas again except to explore introspection in the framework of self-directed religion.

In five lines you introduce half a dozen concepts that only exist to set the stage, so to speak, before you get into the meat of the poem which is failure. They are too necessary to be throwaways, but too tangental to be worth much other than their introductory value.

The poem jumps again in the end as it strays from religion and some defined other you need to please to the narrator's own ego, something that was not introduced in either the beginning or middle but at the same time only works with the beginning and middle outlined.

I don't get a sense of an inverse pyramid like with some poems that start broad and end narrow. The jumps are too sudden and metaphors too choppy, scattered almost, to have that true sense of unity. I like the general concept of drilling down from gods and worship to personal moral failing (which would firmly put this under spiritual poetry, and it already flirts with that line), but there needs to be a stronger thread throughout to have you go from wool to yarn.

There's something here. But it reads like you each took on a section instead of all working all sections at once, which would've produced a stronger end result.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

~Rosey

It does seem a bit thrown-together, but I like the imagery a lot, and the theme. Some poems by a single person try to sound thrown-together, and I can't say it's particularly bad in this case. The theme seems like it's supposed to be jarring in the first place. The person wanted immortality, and gained "immortality" through their failure. Everyone wants immortality, but what is this? Another kind of death? Failing means that something isn't. How can you be immortal through not being? It's like some tragic poem and it's contradictory, yet the contradiction doesn't stop the tragedy from being real. The opening lines also reminded me of Prometheus by Goethe. Was that intentional? I don't think it was, since I've just been going back and reading that over and over, but the theme fits. Of course Prometheus is sort of martyred for a while and this person is shamed forever, so it's not completely the same, but alchemy and knowledge in general as some sort of Promethean quest is a common theme.

I also had to actually look up the title, so congratulations on that too.

Hey guys!

I saw this was in the spotlight and that it had no reviews, so I'd better give you one. I hadn't noticed until I had read it that it had three authors!

Unfortunately, I think that showed in the poem. It didn't quite seem cohesive, I felt that there was an awful lot of metaphors going on here and I didn't quite grasp the theme that was presumably running through the entire thing. The first five lines were totally detached from the last five lines, not only in metaphor and era but also in intention. The impossible quest at first seems to be a quest for self-actualisation and a cure to all ills, the middle section I assumed was using alchemy to achieve the same thing, but by the end it is about the different types of immortality, which to me, is a very different thing to how we started.

I think mainly there are too many different images racing after one another here, and it does seem like there are several different poems going on - I'm not sure how I feel about that. The altars are followed all too fast by the Voyage of the Dawn Treader like travel to the end of the world, and the reference to "the gods" seems totally archaic even compared to that, let alone to the "bulletin board in the basement" at the end. I'm all for anachronisms, but you are talking about the futility of chasing immortality - so don't go spanning eras yourselves.

I think my favourite lines were about the failures and futilities of alchemy (question though, is the Philosopher's Stone even a stone? I thought it was just a nickname given to the elixir of life!). My least favourite were the book ends about prayers and then the last line: "breaking off a stem of pity to give back to you" -- a stem from where? The organic nature of the word also clashes in my mind with the beautiful world of academia and old fashioned science in the earlier lines.

Essentially, I think it needs work to be a bit more cohesive, to develop a more singular message and to keep the imagery in line. There's some lovely bits in there, but maybe they need split up and sent their separate ways to their own poems to really shine.

Hope I helped, drop me a note if you need anything!