I found the structure of Rich?s poems to be confusing at first, but appropriate for her style. I usually prefer short poems, so Rich?s eight-section or seventeen-page poems (?Midnight Salvage? and ?A Long Conversation?) were a bit hard to swallow for me, partly because my attention span is not so great, but also partly because I couldn?t really tell how the sections fit into one cohesive poem. I felt like, on the whole, Rich?s poems were not cohesive. I felt that they ended unresolved, unexplained. Many of her poems have very little punctuation, especially periods, which makes it hard at times to tell when one thought ends and another begins. ?For An Anniversary,? for example, has no periods, and only one comma, and even ends without any punctuation. At first I was bothered by this syntactical open-endedness, but I found it mimicked the content of the poems, and was thus a fitting style for Rich?s poetry.
The stylistic elements I found effective were the line breaks and the way Rich positioned the sections of her poems on the page. I found that Rich?s poems progressed well. I also think that, because her poems are so heavy with allusion and philosophical musing, it was wise of her to only place one section on each page, instead of just leaving a space, the next number, and then the next section. This format provided a little break for readers, and also allowed them to fully digest one section before moving on to the next. While this structural choice highlighted the complexities of each section of Rich?s poems, I found that it was not effective in unifying the sections into cohesive poems. In ?The Art of Translation,? I couldn?t find the connection between two people with a stick between them and a customs booth (sections two and four). I felt that each section worked well, was beautiful, on its own, as a little snapshot, beautifully written and simple, and that when Rich put many of these snapshots together under one title they often just confused me as I tried to find a common link. This confusion detracted from the quality of the work. The reader had to make too many steps to get over the bridge, and thus could not appreciate the view.
I think the strongest element of Rich?s poetry is her language. The words flowed flawlessly, and sounded quite lyrical. I started reading silently, but found that I understood, and enjoyed, the poems much more when I read them aloud. Lyrically, ?Char? was my favorite poem. Its first line demonstrates what I like about Rich?s language: ?There is bracken there is the dark mulberry.? The line has both hard and lagging sounds (bracken versus mulberry), and the lack of punctuation facilitates a flowing nature that the poem could not have had if it was grammatically correct.
Some reoccurring themes were happiness, as the quotation in the beginning of the book would suggest, and also politics, as there were a lot of references to Communism. But I didn?t feel like Rich was confining herself within themes; instead, I think she focused on keeping the sound and concreteness of her poems constant, thus creating a cohesive book of poetry.
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Williams? collection of poetry entitled Repair is primarily based on language and imagery. He creates lyrical snapshots in each of his poems, most of which describe the brokenness of mankind. Williams describes two ways in which man, specifically himself, is broken.
Williams opens with the poems ?Ice? and ?The Train,? which set the tone and introduce the main themes of the remaining poems. ?Ice? introduces two central themes: brokenness and the desire to repair that which has been broken. In ?Ice,? Williams tackles these subjects specifically, speaking only about the physical breaking, and wish to repair, of ice. ?The Train? also introduces two themes: Williams? desire to be an animal and his inability to connect with neither human nor creature. The poetic construction of a scene seen from a train is common, and Williams uses the physical separation between the speaker and the rabbit, inherent in such a scene, to also point out an emotional separation. ?The Train? also shows that the speaker?s interactions with his human peers are equally disconnected. The speaker is not alone in the car; since he describes an obnoxious man on a cell phone behind him, and yet he does not try to converse with his fellow humans; surrounded by people he feels ?trapped.? For refuge, he looks out towards the animal world. Williams uses a few images of animals throughout the collection, and reflects on how he wishes that he was more like them: ?I didn?t know if I wanted to break [the horse] or be him? (from ?Gas?). In such poems when Williams uses animal characters, the animals are found in grimy industrial settings: the rabbit of ?the Train? was in the rubble before abandoned factories and the crow of ?Shock? was in a scrap yard. Williams seems to admire such animals precisely because they can survive in the man-made world, and perhaps Williams feels that he cannot.
Another central theme, not as explicitly addressed in the first two poems, is William?s inability to be fully intimate with the ones that he is closest to. In two poems, ?Archetypes? and ?The Dress,? he focuses on two important women in his life, his lover and his mother, respectively, and how he does not truly know either of them. In ?Archetypes,? Williams describes a scene in which he is in bed with his lover, and she has an episode in her sleep, snarling and crouching, and then returns to the woman he knows, murmuring ?Sleep, love? when he looks at her. He distinguishes between the two types of intimacy in ?Archetypes,? as well as in ?Biopsy?: two people can share the good things in life, and love each other passionately, but they cannot share the fears and the pain; it is impossible for two people to truly know everything about each other. Williams continues this theme in ?the Dress,? in which he describes his mother and the housedresses she wore during his childhood. In ?the Dress,? and in ?The Cup,? Williams expresses his feeling of distance from his mother, and, ultimately, the entire female gender: ?it was those dresses that made women so unknowable and forbidding,/ adepts of enigmas to which men could have no access, and boys no conception? (from ?the Dress?).
While William?s poems are predominately about the wounds of life, he offers some insight towards a means of mending, of repair, in poems such as ?Lost Wax,? ?The Dance,? ?Tender,? and ?Space.? Williams offers two solutions to be found in life, which may make the damages from living more endurable: love and knowing one will eventually die. In ?Lost Wax,? Williams explicitly states the powers of love: ?What might heal you? Love./ What make you whole? Love.? ?Tender? and ?Space? both speak about the comfort in knowing that one will eventually die. The comfort is not in knowing, or reveling in the fact that the suffering will all be over soon, but in the ability it gives one to appreciate the beautiful things while one still can:
I wonder if this is what the last, indivisible instant
before death might be, before the absolutely unluminous (sic) absence.
To open one?s tangible eyes just then, as I do now: light, shapes, color! Close again; darkness without end, but wait, still glow, still sentience:
bliss.
from ?Space?
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