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What Caught My Eye

I like to review newbies, and I love poetry... so I decided to give this piece a look. I'm pretty glad that I did... this is cute.

Favorite Aspects

This sounds like it came from Oh,the Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss. If that's what you were going for, you hit it. If you've never read it... well, it's basically this poem but super long and probably more polished than any other Seuss book I've read. Adults love that one too... it's a common graduation present and whatnot.

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.

I'd have stopped reading at the "surpass/grounds" lines because you lost your rhyme. Like I said, this is Seussian... gotta have that rhyme. When it dropped off, you lost me.

Language / Word Choice

This does seem to use family-style language. A child could understand it, which is helpful. There are some pretty big hiccups near the end.

1. You will surpass WHAT? Doesn't say, and there is nothing surpassable near enough the line to guess really.

2. The "happy to live on these grounds" line doesn't relate to anything else in the poem at all. It seems totally random. First, it's not even telling the reader to do it. "Be happy to live on these grounds" would fit the poem better. But even then... you'd be better off axing this line and replacing it with one that says what will be surpassed and that rhymes with "surpassed".

"all obstacles for you will pass"
"because the obstacles you face won't last"

Something. If you want, you can go ahead and use of of those... or you can go with whatever you want. The keys really are for it to relate to what is surpassed from the previous line and fitting the rhyme scheme you created.

3. The last line doesn't make any sense to me in context. Like... what? Not the best way to end it.

Effect

I think it's safe to say that this ran out of steam. The beginning was pretty tight... then it just fell apart completely for me. If you change anything, change those two lines (grounds/colder). It will help lots. The only other thing I've got is that this doesn't feel unique to me... it sounds like that book mentioned previously... but not as cohesive. That said, the flow is pretty nice and the message is a positive one. No complaints about that part. This reads as a first draft, which is reflected in my rating... but it has real promise. Good luck with it!





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