Hi again, bettysk You said to review anytime, so here I am.


What Caught My Eye

The title caught my eye. Seemed scifi. Once I looked at the genres... fantasy... close enough.

Favorite Aspects

You catch a nice flow with your choppy comma-filled first two lines. Usually, that type of symmetry would bother me, but the flow is tight.

Hook
In my reviews, I like to focus a bit on the opening line(s) of a poem. Sometimes, people forget that a good hook is as important for a poem as it is for a story. It might be more important, in fact. Given the length of a poem, the intro (that hook) is a considerable percentage of the piece as a whole. It needs to be both functional and interesting to serve its purposes.

The first two lines are a pretty adequate hook, though to be honest, the second line does most of the work. The first is just... okay.

The end gets way way out of whack for the flow. This is written out as a poem (prose has paragraphs and typical sentence structure... this isn't prose... maybe prose poetry but even then it seems too poetry) so the flow matters. The "Good Book" line is particularly off for the flow. It also abruptly ends the rhyming completely.

I would set this aside for a few months and then read it aloud. There is some awkwardness in lines 4-5, line 6 gets pretty clunky, and after that, it falls apart.

Also, if you're going to rhyme, I'd try to stick with a stronger rhyme scheme, since this one looks like an accident to be honest. aabcbded... it's a pattern but loose and unclear until you go back and look at what happened. To be fair, if the flow was tighter, it might have helped the rhyme scheme feel more purposeful as well. The random internal rhymes on certain lines also seems random:

a
a
b-b
c
b
d
e-e
d

That is random. What would have seemed purposeful would be c-c and e-e... so the nonrhyming lines would have their own inner-line rhyme.

Language / Word Choice

Lots of -ing in here. Stopping, slowing, showing, saving, knowing, wrongdoing (a noun but still adds an -ing sound in here). That feels a bit too heavy to me.

There is room to tighten some of the language too, particularly in the bulky later lines. The most obvious being:

"Gather my pride, I know I never hurt someone, knowing"
Gather my pride, I never hurt someone, knowing

The repeat of "know" isn't that interesting a choice, and if you are saying something about yourself... you clearly know. I don't think it adds much meaning.

Imagery

The hovering ship totally disappears around line 5 and never returns. It's a totally dropped metaphor, and the ending would be far more impactful if it kept the theme (and hopefully, some of the imagery) going. Ropes aren't really ship specific... guide lines are used in many circumstances. What's not? Hmmm... anchors, ship terminology like starboard, sails, etc. I'd try for something more specific than ropes just so that the original image doesn't get lost.

Emotiveness

This didn't make me feel anything at all. It's a bit wordy and feels like it's explaining something rather than unfolding it for the reader to experience. Common of a first or second or even 10th draft.

Technical

There doesn't seem to be much reasoning behind when you you sentence punctuation and when you just comma everything...? Some sentences use periods, some use commas, and some with periods are actually multiple sentences. I'd vote for making it all sentence structure. If it looks silly to have so many periods (The ship hovers. Never stopping, it hovers.) It's really a problem with the structure of your lines. You know? Something to look at if you revise.

One Thing to Work On?
What one thing will make the biggest difference for this piece?

Consistency. Consistent flow, punctuation, rhyme, metaphor/imagery... that is what would help most.

Effect

Good luck with any revisions, love!





My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .