Hey, I'm reviewing people on Team Tortoise so here I am ^^
Specifics
1. I'm going to start off totally picky and say you could find a more interesting word than 'race'. It doesn't do much in the way of setting the atmosphere for me and I kind of want to see something like bound or dash. Maybe it's that I want some kind of forest play on words in there like rush or spring or maybe you could go for something darker like 'we'd break through the forest' or 'we'd fall through the forest'. I just feel like that word is the pivot of the first line and could be doing much more.
2. In a similar way I think you could take a look at some of the other verbs in the first stanza and spice them up. Maybe even a couple of the adjectives like 'vile'. Don't go over the top but maybe try to add just a dash more purpleness.
3. The second stanza has a really beautiful flow to it, all of this does really so while I'm telling you to spice things up, keep the vocabulary simple, just more carefully selected if that makes any sense at all?
4.
I both like and don't like those last two lines. I like that it seems to imply things are a little different there and seems to suggest there's something more here, something deeper, but I don't like that it takes away from your final line of the poem which I really love and feel deserves all the emphasis it gets and I also don't know if you explore that deeper something enough to be worth having this here. It feels like it adds a certain incompleteness to the poem and I'm not sure how I feel about that, maybe if there were more hints at the comparison between now and then it would work better?And if it came down harder, to where our clothes were a few shades darker,
we'd let our hair down, gallop the way we thought humans were made to,
and shriek with the sheer pleasure of it all, screaming into the sky,
releasing what had built up within us, even then.
Overall
There's not a lot I don't like about this. I think you could do more with it, push a little deeper and be a little more measured in your choice of words, but for the most part I love the emotion and imagery and it makes for a great little snap-shot and captured that kind of freedom of being a child in the rain very nicely. It's not currently doing much more than that and I'm not likely to go away and remember this as a poem which made me think hard or anything like that, but it did evoke memories of childhood and it's a lovely read so nicely done.
All the best!
~Heather
Points: 6235
Reviews: 2631
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