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4 Public Reviews Given
7 Total Reviews Given
Public Reviews
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Review by GMakin Author IconMail Icon
Rated: E | (3.0)
I feel as though I must write a riposte.

Firstly it seems you are taking for granted more in your argument than the naturalist makes in his own. Your conclusions are essentially unsound because your premises are based upon a misrepresentation of the current understanding of reality and the underlying fabric of the universe.

Certainly there exist causal relationships in nature. Your description of how you came to write this argument is a perfect example of such. Where you err, however, is in your belief that the naturalist must accept that your act was inevitable and ordained since the dawn of time.

In fact modern scientific knowledge would suggest that any of the steps you list in order for this work to have been created were merely possibilities until the moment of their occurrence.

The current state of scientific thought, invention and endeavour is not based, as you would have us believe, on the certainty of causal relationships, but precisely on their opposite. Quantum physics has long maintained that there exists a measurable uncertainty at the very heart of nature.

This is known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and is no naturalist 'trapdoor' but the very heart of the matter.

please see here for a reasonable description
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle...

If the uncertainty principle were invalid, then everything created upon the basic tenets of quantum physics would crumble into sand. The computers you and I are communicating through would not exist. This website would not exist. Your article would not exist in this form.

Indeed your article appearing at all is based just as much upon the uncertainty of the universe as upon the now mere probabilities inherent in causal relationships.

It must follow that the existence of uncertainty in the fabric of the universe implies indeterminacy and the possibility of free will. Things can happen by chance.

If the Heisenberg principle is true, therefore, your consequent arguments to invalidate the naturalist position are deeply brought into question.


I find your response to such a challenge to your argument a little unsatisfying

"However, having a more traditional bias in favor of empiricism when it comes to the study of natural phenomena, I suspect that someday the behavior of these particles will be shown to have such a relationship"

This is mere opinion unless backed up by fact or cogent logical argument. I do not deny you may be right, but you cannot deny you may well be wrong.

Overall, though your argument is clear and logical it uses a straw man's version of empiricism and naturalism in order to prove the superiority of an essentially biassed view.

As I have already stated, the most troublesome (for your view) aspects of naturalist argument are dealt with unsatisfactorily in a footnote. As such your treatment of the matter at hand is neither fair nor complete.

Until you close these holes in your argument there exists the possibility, nay probability, that free will exists in the uncertainty inherent to our universe and not in the certainty of the existence of another.


I very much enjoyed reading your piece.
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Review by GMakin Author IconMail Icon
Rated: 18+ | (4.0)
This is clearly a very demanding form of poem to write. The subject is of immense difficulty and sensitivity and it must be extremely hard to express the feelings associated with a childhood violation when you haven't suffered one yourself and even more difficult if you have.

I have not as yet read any of your other work and so I cannot offer any reasoned criticism as to how it fits into any overall plot, character development or both. I shall criticise this purely as a poem and as a piece of work in its own right.

It might feel like I'm ripping your work to shreds, i'm not. Consider the length of time It must have taken to construct this review and then think if I would have taken the time if I considered the poem worthless.

Firstly any criticism I make would depend upon your intentions in writing it. I am going to make the assumption that this poem is intended to shock the reader into certain forms of extreme emotional response. That in writing it both Lisas desire the reader to feel the same things as the victim, to take her place. The world should feel Lisa's wretchedness and understand her plight.

To achieve this the poem must be at once immediate and visceral. I must become the twelve year old victim.

Certainly in the poem I see the darkness, feel her pain, smell his breath and hear his words. However I do not do so with any immediacy nor regularity. I seem to feel at intervals.

This, I suspect, is because the poem is too broken by unnecessary stanzas.

"
Can ever I leave this dark place?
I hold my hands over my face.
The demon from the door hisses my name,
this beast, this shadow, this shame."

In my opinion this stanza is completely unnecessary and the poems impact would be immeasurably improved simply by its deletion. I am not arguing with its content, the direction of which and the feelings within are excellent in their own right. However you want the reader to be on the spot, taken on a whirlwind of ever increasing torment. This stanza breaks up the grotesque act the rest of the poem describes, affords the reader temporary respite and thus lessens the overall immediacy and consequently the impact of the peice suffers.

The immediacy of the poem would also be improved if you ommitted certain words.

Consider for example changeing

"There is a darkness in this room
One of emptiness, of foreboding, of doom
Silence shivers into sound,
A creak down the hall, rattles all around."

to

"There is a darkness in this room
Of emptiness, foreboding, doom.
Silence shivers(Shatters?)into sound
A creaking doorway rattles round"


Not only does this bring the action closer, but also improves the poem's timbre and movement. The shorter the poems metre, the more immediate the act.

Another criticism I have is that the poem fails to gather momentum, its ending is not its climax. Rather there are peaks and troughs in which the reader can get lost and where empathy is drained.

You are beaten, you recoil. You are beaten, you faint. You are raped, you lie still. In my view the form of this poem should be that of a hammer and a nail, not the sliding of the tide. The focus should be the constant beating of your body and mind rising towards its tortured, helpless end, rather than the drift from torment to helplessness and back again the poem embodies in its current form.

The final criticism I have is the dehumanising of the rapist to demon and beast. Dehumanising the rapist only serves to dehumanise the rape, make it less urgent in the eyes of the reader. While this might be a necessary wall to build in the mind of your character, be aware that it lessens to a degree the impact upon your audience. The act would be so much the more tortured the more human the rapist is made to seem.

I hope this criticism is useful too you, if not I can only apologise. It is a very solid piece of work as it is, but would undoubtedly benefit from further refinement.
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Review of Dreamers  Open in new Window.
Review by GMakin Author IconMail Icon
Rated: E | (3.0)
The air of whimsy you manage to cast with your words is perfect for the subject of the poem and its drifting style leaves me in a pensive state of mind.

It actually made me write down some thoughts of my own.

Sometimes it is almost as if you were dreaming yourself when you wrote it and this ability to represent the subject of the poem in its form is a talent you should definitely focus on in future.

The strength of your poem, therefore, lies in its structure and movement. A transferable strength and a good one to have.

Your poem does have several weaknesses however which I feel it would be instructive to address.

Among the first things I look for in a poem are intent and meaning. I am left unsure of what these are in relation to your poem.

Are you speaking of children, or any given set of dreamers? Are you speaking for a child, or is your audience older?

In my view (and it is only my view)you would benefit from being more bold and definite in your handling of the poem.

A simple way of doing this would be to ascribe the generalising "an optimistic heart" , "their dreams" etc to a specific person.

The use of 'Your' would also help to draw the reader in and the reader would be more inclined to feel you were speaking to him rather than over him.

Some of your concepts are rather touching, specifically the idea of searching within while looking without. An interesting and provoking insight, but one that deserves greater treatment than you give it.

You are let down more by what you don't say rather than what you do. Which of itself is very good.

Ask yourself at each line what you mean by it and then delve below it. Immerse yourself in your topic.

Towards the end of the poem you say

"With clarity I quickly see
How wise these dreamers are"

Yet you do not explain what these benefits are either for the subject of the poem nor for yourself. This had the effect of me feeling cheated of a deeper insight than the one offered and which I feel it is probably within your power to give.

How does "the optimistic heart play?" What thoughts and emotions might it give rise to? How does the emotional state of the dreamer impinge upon the dreams she has?

What might "This simple answer" be? Perhaps it is different for each individual. In which case what is the question?

To give you some idea of the power of being specific in your handling of a poem the following, I think, would be the most helpful example.

(It is in the public domain!)


"Words, Wide Night"

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us. I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this

is what it is like or what it is like in words.

by Carol Ann Duffy (The Other Country)


In this poem there is a specific dreamer, a specific subject for that dream, specific emotions, specific thoughts and a specific motivation. The power of the piece is exceptional and loses none of its dream like quality in being more definite.

Please be aware that this review took some time to write on my part and the fact I made the effort means I liked your work and that my criticisms are simply trying to make it better rather than trash it. If you think I have then I apologise. It would most definitely be an unfair and untrue reflection of my sentiments towards it.

Good luck and happy writing.
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Review by GMakin Author IconMail Icon
Rated: 18+ | (3.5)
This is a lovely poem, however I am not sure that it is a lullaby.

I like the sentiment expressed in it and you do a good job of gracefully presenting this. I have a vivid and touching image of you lulling your child to sleep and the timbre is successfully tender and loving, without being excessively so.

My criticisms are mostly technical.

One line tends to run into another without the proper use of punctuation. This tends to lead the reader astray and leaves them a little confused.

I would consider breaking it down into stanza's in order to provide a little more structure and natural breathing points.

The metre is slightly unsettling in places. For me it doesn't sit well with your subject which would be a gentle rocking into sleep.

What I mean by this is that I'm not quite sure in places how to read it.

eg.

The line "So close your weary eyes" seems to be a natural stopping place, however that would mean the next line didn't make much sense.

The next natural stopping place would then be at "...lay down your head".

However the definite stopping place at "where will you be led?" is only two lines later, after an opening of 5 lines. This leads to an imbalance in the 'feel' of the piece. The sentiment you express through your concepts suffers as a result.

I'm well aware I could be reading the piece incorrectly, but these are my honest feelings vis a vis its construction.

Please be aware I still thoroughly enjoyed it. It left me feeling peaceful and thoughtful, which is why I chose to review it. :)


Oh yes!

One thing I think does jar is the concept of 'cries' being 'soothing'.
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