Review: Meaghan Russell
The poem “poo-tee-weet (why I gave up poetry)” opens with a salutation to Kalil Gibran. To me, this makes perfect sense, one poet speaking to another in a way that they can understand: through the use of poetry. Given the current events between Hezbollah and Israel, I like that the choice of Kalil Gibran is not random, but intentional. He was Lebanese and wrote extensively about politics and his country. I am also a fan of Kurt Vonnegut and appreciated the use of a title and subtitle for your poem. Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” also had a subtitle, “The Children’s Crusade.” I like the line, “words are never so important as they are in war time,” and following this, the next four lines list how words lose their import. I think you could have skipped the explanation of the title. It is esoteric, but if you really wanted it to be more accessible you could have called it something else.
“for mary oliver” evokes many contrasting images. Visual: trees who shimmy like jazz dancers/ shrapnel…through nameless villages, tactile: evaporating heat from bare arms/notes rubbing each other raw and textural: plaid fabric-skin, winds pattern on the water. I liked symbolism of the flag in this poem. The first two verses show the contradiction of this symbolism and the third synthesizes the contradictions by stating that, “it is given shape in all of this.” Rather that denoting what something is, the poet leaves room for interpretation by defining what it is not.