Re: a comment on Deja Vu by sliver	28-Apr-06/12:29 PM
More interesting now but I have to suggest (and you can kill me for this if you like) that you need to bring the waves in somewhere earlier rather than just chucking them in out of the blue, so to speak. Perhaps bring the sea in where you talk about the horizon and you would achieve a little more continuity. Still decent enough though.
Re: Meditation on the Future by MacFrantic	28-Apr-06/12:25 PM
Not deserving of a zero. This is actually a really good read, and has some choice passages - and you can dash, although I would remind you that 'a gentleman will walk but never run'. I don't want to try critiquing this at all as I like the whole thing, in particular the middle of stanza one and all of stanzas three and four. The only suggestion I'd make is that the autumn/winter of life aspect isn't as original as the rest.
Re: Cry by Sunny	28-Apr-06/12:17 PM
Not bad at all, although there are a few things I would change. I dislike 'dollop' and 'splat' at the best of times; more so in poetry - I find them a little, well, unpoetic. They don't seem at all emotive to me, and there are more effective words for onomatopoeic purposes. The other criticism I have with this is the repetition of 'knot' and semi-repetition of 'bone/boney'. Again this is personal preference; I write with as few repetitions as possible because Ifind it more of a challenge that way, both to write and read. I also have a question (instead of diving straight in with criticism) about the penultimate line. 'Song waves' is confusing. It could be song waves (as in sound waves, in which case I'd hyphenate it to show it's a compound noun). Alternatively you're talking about the mourning waving upwards ('The mourning that bellows from my lips...waves upward'). If so, it needs some punctuation after 'song'. That's it for crits, now for what I liked. 'Knot under my chest bone...' and then 'mouth still open from the appearance' work well, as does 'shuttering shoulders' (and the rest of that passage). Overall, enjoyable.
Re: Portrait Paradelle by Enkidu	28-Apr-06/12:02 PM
Quite frankly this is astonishing. I haven't come across paradelles before, and although I now want to write one, to emulate this is a hugely intimidating task. This would be a solid ten but for two points: 1) the end of stanza three is slightly off and 2) 'light what grows' isn't right. If those could be fixed I would gladly give this a ten. Let this not detract, however, from a magnificent effort.
Re: a comment on slice of moonlight by lmp	28-Apr-06/11:44 AM
Yes, I much prefer the ending to this edit. The last two lines are grand. One slight grammatical point - line 15 ('your sweet peace my endless joy') needs either some punctuation or to be '...is my endless joy'. It probably holds up grammatically as it is, but it just feels wrong. Either way of remedying this would work without disrupting the rhythm, and would make me a happy reader ;-) No other crits that I can see right now; good stuff!
Re: 99% of the Time by TLRufener	26-Apr-06/12:24 PM
1) - is the footnote meant to be a part of the poem or just an aside? 2) - try writing this out of first person. One of the keys to good poetry is making it something the reader can feel part of.
Re: a comment on To Brittany by amanda_dcosta	26-Apr-06/12:21 PM
Ah, and it did put me in mind of ALChemy's poem (that and 'Sunlighting' too). But it did so gently, without being too blatent.
Re: To Brittany by amanda_dcosta	26-Apr-06/12:15 PM
This is really nice. The rhymes kept it moving fluidly and the imagery is direct and vivid. I think in your last poem I commented about your writing being like a sketch; well this is a pastel landscape. I would change two aspects of it - firstly the repetition (the first 'perhaps' - change to 'maybe', and the second 'smile') and 'gap' didn't quite seem right for clouds. No, I can't explain why I said that, it just seemed slightly off centre. The rest is magnificent.
Re: a comment on Murder Phoenix Born (meta-villanelle) by Ranger	26-Apr-06/11:58 AM
New idea for line 17: 'Arrow feathered, flew, chiselled bone' I think I want to keep the flight aspect of it. I'm not sure if this edit quite works with the rhythm yet or not.
Re: a comment on Murder Phoenix Born (meta-villanelle) by Ranger	26-Apr-06/11:55 AM
I doubt very much whether 'meta-vil' is a true class of poetry, but I've used it as a reflection of the metaku (a haiku about writing a haiku - this poem is a villanelle about writing a villanelle). Essentially, think of the poem as a phoenix; the dying phoenix is a false start which gets turned into a new poem. That may or may not make sense...I have probably over-complicated this poem if I'm honest. It can be summed up in the fallen leaf line. And then there's the play on 'feathered', which was partly to join the stories together and partly for fun. This was written to demand rereads and a close analysis - thanks for taking the time =D
Re: Deja Vu by sliver	26-Apr-06/11:49 AM
It's tricky to critique a lyric without the music so I'll limit myself to saying just that I liked the majority of it as lyric material, but I felt the last line let it down a bit. It was too...predictable. If you can insert a bit more imagination there I would like this more.
Re: Tang Soo Do See Do by ecargo	26-Apr-06/11:39 AM
Energetic - I felt the sharp breaths and sounds of martial artistry here. Is Tang Soo Do an offensive or defensive discipline? I can't tell whether there's a definite object pictured here but I like the arrowing of it; conversely it also resembles the way the body folds if you've been hit in the stomach. The lines which 'stick out' a little also give the impression of speed lines. Or it could be a top-down starship...
Re: a comment on First Warm Day on Santa Barbara Bay by Dovina	25-Apr-06/5:48 PM
Well what I failed to say was that the benefit of having the commas is that it keeps the images brief like the spray from the waves, or like how the world appears when you dive into a wave.
Re: a comment on The Way of Monsters by MacFrantic	25-Apr-06/5:45 PM
"Maybe it's too many video games" - I never saw you as a gamer, ecargo...
Re: a comment on Fraser's Wedding by Stephen Robins	25-Apr-06/5:42 PM
Did they get Dark Angel to write a speech (or, even better, the vows...)?
Re: First Warm Day on Santa Barbara Bay by Dovina	25-Apr-06/5:33 PM
There are just a couple too many commas in here for my taste but no other problems to my eyes. Great description and I feel that there are many interpretations which could be attached to this. Stanza four was far and away the best.
Re: a comment on I Sleep by Sunny	25-Apr-06/5:18 PM
I got the idea of the transferral from living to the afterlife then back again perhaps - reincarnation. I like the idea of the nomad - going from physical life to spiritual life (can also apply to going from waking reality to dreaming). The passage has a slight grammatical glitch to my eyes. 'I sleep as a nomad that listlessly tosses one day's plain and settles in on another' - you don't often find people tossing a plain. I guess you might mean tossing blankets and then whirling landscapes in dream but still...I'd consider possible revisions for that. I'm still musing over 'seperated hair', it seems very meaningful but isn't evident to my eyes (I'm tired, bear with me). 'Life remains outside' is a good way to talk about a dead body - or even a body in a coffin. Then you have the play of morning/mourning. 'Dissever from reality' is to split from reality, either by dreaming or by death. 'Discriminate from sin' is understandable, but it feels like you're playing with grammar there...ideally you'd discriminate something from sin. I assume you're using it reflexively there...well I've never come across it as a reflexive verb. 'I sleep...to discriminate myself from sin'. 'Ramify from...' works well to show the dreams seeping out like the soul from a newly-deceased person. All-round good work, really it's only the grammatical points which need working on.
Re: To Err With Doves by MacFrantic	25-Apr-06/7:28 AM
This is beautifully meaningful, and when I've worked out why I shall let you know! Stanza three is the best in the poem.
Re: Fraser's Wedding by Stephen Robins	25-Apr-06/7:25 AM
Sounds like a typically English celebration. Beautiful.
Re: a comment on grim task by lmp	25-Apr-06/7:14 AM
"Weak". Here goes. Stanza 1 - the end of the day = death. The middle of a dreary week (1st reflection of 'weak') is eternity; whenever you are is in the middle of it, like being at any point on the circumference of a circle. Stanza 2 - I can't remember what I arrived at with this one, it might have been with the connotations of dirt and grime (i.e. the weak souls, maybe those too weak to resist temptation?) His own reek reflected the zealous sort of attitude of a preacher, never admitting to being holy enough to be worthy of a place in Heaven - the weakness of being mortal. Stanza 3 - pray/prey. Either he is prey to something, or the other souls are weak prey. Stanza 4 - 'wet silty clay' offers no resistance to his actions; and then there is 'meek', which is obvious enough. Stanza 5 - 'creak' carries connotations of old age, fragility and immobility. So that is possibly how I got to my conclusion...I'm sure there's stuff I thought of but have missed - now all I have to do is find the rest of it and make it all cohere!