review 7: Derek Salisbury

One of my favorite lines in A Farewell is "a brilliant plumage of greens and blues". All the ways you've brought us into the trip- she melted to the bench, the sweating, the colors- these are the details I want from this piece. In the middle you get ginsbergian, "We were lovers in a cheap motel bed!/ We were soldiers in an unwinnable war!/ We were always together in every past life!" which is good for this poem, passion! hallucinations of love! I think he'd approve. Now, this is what I want, LOVE IS AN ACID TRIP. What do you think? Give us the mind bending, the crazy visions, the intense emotion, how it feels endless, everything's beautiful and then there are premonitions, irrational fears, the come down, and the next day it kicks your ass. Isn't that the kind of love you're talking about? The parallel could be brilliant. I like that it takes place in the nation's captial. All that idealism and pomp sets the stage, "the glowing domes of our nation's dying capital". I think you could strengthen that parallel too.
An Irish Saturday Night gets a staggering two..no, three, no..how many thumbs are there? Anyway, thumbs up. Fun to read. One thing I'd suggest is adding more of the language, some of the real gaelic slang. You've done well with the storytelling, very true to the subject matter of Irish pub songs. (I was in southern Ireland a few summers ago so I'm a little biased for this piece.) I get the feeling you're trying to modernize it a bit, the traditional songs I've heard don't say "slut" outright. The Irish are fond of riddles and trueisms, maybe try to say these things with more irony, in a more indirect or round about way. Think dirty limericks. "Dear ol' Monk sings to grieve for his dad,/ he left Monk everything that he had./ So we raise our mugs high/ with tears in our eyes/ 'cause that man left a bitch of a tab".
Both of these are worth the work of revision. Great material.