Below are five poems I admire and brief reasons why the poems interest me. Read the poems for yourself by clicking the hyperlinks.
*** "Nothing But Death" by Pablo Neruda This Neruda poem incorporates many rhetorical devices such as metaphor. It "balances" dark subject with vivid details and resonating lyricism. Read the poem aloud and learn from its mastery of language. "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop Like the Neruda poem, this Bishop poem demonstrates a masterful command of language, describing in detail a caught fish. The poem demands to be read aloud, its music an echo refusing to be silent. Exemplifying epizeuxis, the religious allusion at the end makes the poem even more captivating and endearing. "Timely Enumerations Concerning Sri Lanka" by Oliver Rice Incorporating many colorful congeries, this Rice poem reads as a dramatic monologue, with the implied speaker acting as a travel guide. The seemingly random collections of "sites" the speaker points out generate powerful historical and emotional connotations. (The concept of an "objective correlative" comes to mind.) Like most poems I love, "Timely Enumerations" demands not only to be read aloud, but also performed in front of others. "The End and the Beginning" by Wisława Szymborska This Szymborska poem poses the question, "What happens to a country after a war?" The first stanza answers this question, and the rest of the poem explores the answer, offering a series of grim images and employing lovely rhetorical devices such as repetend. "The Student" by Dorianne Laux One of my favorite Laux poems, "The Student" describes a simple relationship between a teacher and pupil in a world built on vivid imagery and assonance. Just as Bishop uses overstatement to highlight the fish in her poem, Laux uses overstatement to explore the teacher-pupil relationship. The last three sentences never fail to astound me. *** Indicative of the types of poems I love to reread, each poem above blends thematic, narrative, and lyrical Truth to create an enduring, emotional experience that balances sound and sense, form and content. Moreover, the poems above are "accessible," though hardly profound in the strictest sense. I plan on continuing to reread these fun poems to learn more about the craft of poetry writing.
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