On a Woodpecker Drinking from a Knothole Still Full of the Last Rain by Maurice Manning, from Verse Daily.
Lots to like here, starting with the title. Just too cool – so beautifully long and almost a poem in itself and the content of the piece such a non sequitur on the face of it. Nice conversational diction, no fancy stuff with sonics, but still whimsically clever, even if a bit self-consciously. Although I had an early moment of irritation working out the interplay between the two metaphors (sun, horse? horse, sun? what, what? – how is that supposed to work?), it did come together for me in the end and I loved this piece all the way to S9L1.
Where it should have ended.
After that the tone gets a bit too priggishly didactic for my taste. Until then it was clean and honest – like a horse, like the sun.
Gratuitous mention of another piece by the same author. Yaay, a punctuation assassin after my own heart, and that No. 6 is the loveliest thing I’ve read all week.
Comments welcome, as usual.
Check out “Where Sadness Comes From,” recently on Poetry Daily (and winner of my Daily Poem Project for that week), as well as the two poems in the May issue of Poetry, especially “A Blasphemy” (which is one of the poems from that issue appearning as featured poems at the Poetry website).
Link: Where Sadness Comes From
Link: A Blasphemy
Thanks, Andrew. Something of the same reaction to the first — loved it but for the last five couplets, would have liked to see it end with I hear/ a hanging all the time.
No nits for the A Blasphemy though – clean heart-string-pulling stuff.