For the most part, there’s an interesting mixture of the fashionably mundane, a repression of even ordinary desire, and something like empathy here. It’s difficult to catch because it’s constantly shifting its stance. But the ending leans in one direction and gives the latter voice away as the dominant one. Which makes one wonder why the first one even makes its frequent appearances. Is it actually a native dialect? Or is it a second language? Is it a spirited original or is it an exhausted copy? Quiet. I’m thinking.
Mehmet Sniffing a Rose by Lillias Bever
It’s lost in its own structure and often justifies a line break for it. And boy do I dislike a poem that has to slap the reader in the face with a metaphor. And this one actually uses the word ‘metaphor’ in the poem to do so. Not that there’s not an interesting poem buried somewhere beneath the tangle and trope.
How Passion Finds Us by Mercedes Lawry
‘Serpent moon.’ ‘Tiger’s eye.’ You better have a pretty good reason to use that kind of language. This one thinks it does but doesn’t.
2 comments:
Lillias Bever's poem won the Tupelo Press Judge's Prize (Michael Collier). All I can say is, Man.
It deserves more than the snap and a half - the line breaks are sometimes quite interesting - but overall I agree. Don't fucking explain the metaphor; show it to me. I'm not an idiot. (Well, sometimes anyway.)
Prizes. Go figure. You might be right about the "more than the snap and a half." But not much more. I was in a bitter mood this morning. And that metaphor business really pissed me off.
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