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125,018 Literary Works • 672,861 Reviews
Hi there.
I like your style. It's not flowery, but still intriguing.
I agree with Kyllorac; it feels quite disjointed. However, after several read-throughs, I think that I might have an idea of what it's about (is it about a drowned person? I'm not very good at making inferences. If it's not, please don't be angry with me).
I like that you made reference to the Shroud of Turin. It makes it seem like this person was very important and perfect to you. However, it also implies some ambiguity attached to this person. You used a heavy symbol to quite an effect.
It is very difficult to patch together all these stanzas without reading it multiple times. I would work on elaborating these stanzas a little, even if it's only to give them a setting. Setting actually goes a long way when showing what's going on.
For example, in the first stanza, if you say
"I met your parents,
your brothers,
and your sister
in your old apartment,
carpeted in beige shag,
and scattered with dust-smelling couches,"
It not only helps set the atmosphere for the poem, but implies that the other person is dead: "your OLD apartment." Also, it implies that you were invited there and thus there aren't hard feelings between the family and you.
Alternatively, if you say
"I met your parents,
your brothers,
your sister,
in the supermarket.
Our carts collided when
I turned the corner.
The fluorescence of the lights
colored my skin yellow"
It implies that you are afraid of facing the family because of some guilt (yellow skin= yellow-bellied= fearful or cowardly), and that the meeting was accidental.
Setting is important.
I think that this will be an interesting poem once some issues are fixed. It was a pleasure to review your poem. Happy writing.
Hey Thank You for the review. And yes you're right it was a girl who had drowned. As for the setting . . . I met the family on the docks on the side of the river. I had never met the girl. I help out with a search and rescue team as a diver (which with a diver is more of a search and recovery team). The Shroud of Turin speaks more about what she meant to her family but it's hard not adopt some of those emotions when you see all of them together.
I agree, I need to elaborate on some of the stanzas, especially the second one. I don't like it at all. Anyways thanks again for the review.
The one thing that really gets me about this poem is how disjointed it is. There's very little, if any, connection between the ideas, and while the ideas near the end fall into place, in the beginning, it's a very rocky start, and I was honestly left wondering why you kept jumping around with the ideas without elaborating on them a bit, much less linking them together more clearly.
Right now, you have a lot of disparate ideas in the first half of the poem that really need better grounding. They're just floating there without any clear connection to the other ideas in the poem, with the connections that do exist being tenuous, and this makes for a very vague and broken in a not-good-way feeling overall.
The second half of the poem is much stronger than the first half, but the reader has to make it through the first half to reach this better second half, and even so, the second half isn't strong enough to salvage the first half completely.
You have some interesting ideas in here, but right now, they're not developed enough to stand strongly enough to carry this poem to a more substantial level. I think if you were to elaborate more on the ideas and make the connections stronger and more visible, it would help strengthen the first half of this poem so that the second half can better shine.
As it stands, this strikes me as being very rough and incomplete, and while it could be a very evocative piece, there's too much distracting from the subject to make it so.
Right? Like how much more disjointed could this really be? Ha no just playing but thank you for the review. It is disjointed. I was feeling pretty "disjointed" at the time but maybe I can go back and elaborate, short of just coming out and saying it. I'd like to hear what you think the subject is, just so we're on the same page.