01-06-2016, 09:47 PM
Excellent stuff, strange and unnerving. It’s true enough that it jars with Christian notions of god, but then they are hardly the only ones available. This has a feel of “Hawk Roosting” by Hughes, a similar psychopathic air of certainty, the theology of a killer.
Yes “I sure wish things were different” does fall jarringly, we’ are suddenly on Walton mountain for a second before landing back in the almost machine like coldness of the piece. I am also randomly tempted to mess with the line “You will take us away from death” and flip it into “you will take death away from us” or even “steal death away from us”, but I offer that only as an example of my own profound wrongheadedness rather than a suggestion.
If I were to set about changing it, though it needs next to no changes for me, I would amp up the bleakness, the grimness of it: sometimes a poem is just a voice speaking and it owes us no explanations. On that level this is superb.
Yes “I sure wish things were different” does fall jarringly, we’ are suddenly on Walton mountain for a second before landing back in the almost machine like coldness of the piece. I am also randomly tempted to mess with the line “You will take us away from death” and flip it into “you will take death away from us” or even “steal death away from us”, but I offer that only as an example of my own profound wrongheadedness rather than a suggestion.
If I were to set about changing it, though it needs next to no changes for me, I would amp up the bleakness, the grimness of it: sometimes a poem is just a voice speaking and it owes us no explanations. On that level this is superb.