Poplars by Donald Revell from Poetry Daily.
Audio by me below.
Hm. This one was hard for me to pull together and I have questions about it. On a broad level I read it as an environmental lament, on global warming, specifically. The most successful stanzas for me were S3 and S4 and I enjoyed the car-dump/poplar/dusty air image in S3. What is the significance of poplars, as opposed to any other tree? Rows, maybe, poplars are good for rows. Why the reference to tentacles, which evokes octopus, which evokes 8, which is then countermanded by “12 exactly”? Not clear to me who the narrator is – the earth, perhaps, the planet? I liked the last two strophes but fret over the shift to China – would that be for overpopulation, strain on natural resources, neglect of the environment? That would work. (Why Peking, rather than Beijing?)
I voted this into third place on Andrew’s Daily Poem Project for this week. I put Inside the Maze in first place and In Another Year of Fewer Disappointments in second.
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