The Poppy Field

[Alexander III]

of my soul…

[Alexander III]

Gonna give this a bump

[Buh4Bee]

It is awesome to be able to read all your poetry. This poem seems to follow the theme of celebrating one's spirit as some of your previous poems have. The story quality to this one carried me through the entire length. If I may presume that this poem can be divided into two parts- I like the way you play around with the perspective of the divine. Interesting, why not? The second part captures a scene from a war. I feel somewhat feeble in my ability to critique this part. I'm not sure the scene of a Revolution is necessary symbolically to express the point of life's existence through the generations. I love the cinematic quality of the end. It is like coming off a roller coaster ride. I'm sure I could say much more, but I need to go make dinner.

[tailor STATELY]

I found 2-references by googling [battle "red poppies"] quickly; one a WWI reference and the other a WWII reference (I'm sure there must be more) - the imagery of bloodstained white poppies being a powerful poetic theme. Your battle appears to pre-date the WW's.

I could imagine General Patton musing over an historic battle; lost in the moment.

Well done.

[Alexander III]

Ah well tailor stateley, the battle is not of a specific reality or time era but rather a snapshot of a multitude of battles, pictured as one.

[MorpheusSandman]

As usual with your work Alex there is an incredibly dense richness and sensuousness to the language that is practically unmatched by other poets around here. I do agree with jersea that here you manage to carry the reader more coherently through the entirety of the piece. I especially like the dynamicism between the images of peace which suddenly erupt in the horrors of war. The only constructive criticism I'd add is that while the luxuriousness of your language is a great strength, you have to be sure not to overuse it. If you bring up the saturation in an image it can enhance the color and feeling, but if you do it too much it's easy to make it become gaudy and too much that it swamps the viewer. There are some parts in this piece where I think you cross that line a bit like "Shouts of fear and beastly violence radiate forth in a crimson fetor clouding the two coats as they merge into one mass…" The prosody is so compounded with adjectives, adverbs, and continuing conjunctions that it becomes very easy for the reader to lose the train of thought; this problem is worsened when the lines are so long. It makes for almost (Henry) Jamesian or Joycean reading at times.