Have just completed the volume of verse. In my youth I would have read it in one sitting, but life has taught me better than to do that. That's why it's taken me so long to write back to you about it.
In terms of structure, your strict - admirable, disciplined - adherence to meter, rhyme and rhyme scheme is never apparent, strained or obtrusive. In fact one has to dig to find it. But it's always there.The tone is - and this is a word of approbation that I find myself using more and more - sober. Lean, serious, unadorned and if not solemn or somber then earnest. Earnest has become my single-most preferred term, both in writing and all other aspects of life. More than honest, which can be simply a passive quality - that is, not being actively dishonest - it includes within itself qualities like uncompromising dedication to truth, and truth in its most basic, pared-down state, as well as yearning and striving.
Without yearning and striving, verse to me is dull and perfunctory, mere self-ndulgence.There is no self-indulgence, no self-advertising in your poems. They have no dead syllables, no empty space, no hollow sound.They also are not infected by winks at the reader, commonplaces or attempts at sensationalism. They are neither lurid nor prurient even when dealing with death and sex.
In short, they are earnest.
In terms of structure, your strict - admirable, disciplined - adherence to meter, rhyme and rhyme scheme is never apparent, strained or obtrusive. In fact one has to dig to find it. But it's always there.The tone is - and this is a word of approbation that I find myself using more and more - sober. Lean, serious, unadorned and if not solemn or somber then earnest. Earnest has become my single-most preferred term, both in writing and all other aspects of life. More than honest, which can be simply a passive quality - that is, not being actively dishonest - it includes within itself qualities like uncompromising dedication to truth, and truth in its most basic, pared-down state, as well as yearning and striving.
Without yearning and striving, verse to me is dull and perfunctory, mere self-ndulgence.There is no self-indulgence, no self-advertising in your poems. They have no dead syllables, no empty space, no hollow sound.They also are not infected by winks at the reader, commonplaces or attempts at sensationalism. They are neither lurid nor prurient even when dealing with death and sex.
In short, they are earnest.
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