Hello
aralls! I have just finished reading "
Cavity"
and would like to take a moment to review your work! Please remember I am not by any means a professional writer or reader and these are just my opinions on how you could better your writing!
Overall Review
Overall, I enjoyed this piece. Not only was the structure unique and fitting to the theme and meaning of the piece, but I found it to be a unique and strangely saddening. I related well to this piece, taking pills on a daily basis to help control my depression, I found a connection with this poem.
Mechanics
This is where I go over your punctuation, grammar and spelling.
I found no spelling, grammar or punctuation errors in this. I did question for a bit why you capitalized the word "Ancient," in your third stanza on the second line, but as I thought more and more about it, I found that I rather liked the idea of having that word capitalized. With a poem like this, where normal sentence formalities have sort of been tossed aside (capitalizing words, specifically) the author really has to take a look at why they're capitalizing words. It sticks out here and it took me a while, but I finally decided I like it.
It actually took me to look up the word "ancient" in the dictionary to try and see if it was normally capitalized or not. I found it wasn't, but I also found this definition:
the civilized peoples, nations, or cultures of antiquity, as the Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, and Egyptians (usually preceded by "the" ). - taken from Dictionary.com.
Whenever a single word is capitalized like that, I think of it as personifying the word in question. So you're personifying the word Ancient and when I relate it to the definition above, I realize that not only are you personifying the word, but you're personalizing it. It's not an ancient burial ground in regards to time, it's an Ancient burial ground, in regards to what's buried there. Your old memories. Your old self. Your old thoughts and feelings, all buried in the ground here. That's what made me really love it. So actually, it's brilliantly used there. Very well done.
The Good
This is where I go over what I enjoyed about your writing.
I liked pretty much everything about this poem. But here are a few of the highlights that really stuck out to me:
Ability to Relate - My ability to relate to this poem was compounded by the fact that I take pills to manage depression. I have it under control now, but it hasn't always been so. I've been through the struggles of wondering why we are the way we are. Where did everything go wrong, why can't I be the person I was way back when. When did my mind betray me? It's relateable to this because in your poem, I just get the sense that anything happy or worthwhile is buried deep down, unable, leaving you hollow and empty. Thus the "cavity" of your brain. There's just a cave where you once were. It's really deep and not a lot of people will be able to relate the way people who suffer with brain disorders will.
Imagery - I really enjoyed the imagery. The cave images just kept coming and I'm glad that you did more with them than just say, "my mind is a cave. there are bats." You used those images and showed what they were doing and the images became metaphors for other things and it just wound and weaved back and forth. It's really well done. One of my favorite was this:
recreation for the naïve explorers confident - I gather that the explorers are the psychologists and the psychiatrists. The doctors trying to fix it, trying to make it go away. I have a concern about this line, though, that I'll express in the next section.
The Bad
This is where I go over what could use improvement in your writing.
The only place I would look at trying to reword would be the line I pointed out above:
recreation for the naïve explorers confident
The reason I want you to look at it is because all of the lines have a natural pause at the end if they had been written without line breaks except for this one. But this line requires you to read the next one to realize what it's saying and that sort of threw me because it threw off the flow of the poem. I would stick with your trend of inserting natural pauses in the line breaks and try to rework this line and the one following to both be able to stand on their own.
The Beautiful!
This is where I go over my favorite part of your writing! (Because who likes the ugly?)
My absolute favorite thing about your poem is the thought that went into it. I'm not sure a lot of people will be able to relate to this the way I have, but coming from the days of being in that dark place and going to doctors and trying new meds to try and bring me up from the depression, this poem fits. It fits well. And the mind really is something we've not yet begun to explore fully, which makes your image of a cave all the more realistic and fitting. Well done.
Overall Star Rating
Write On!
My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Go Noticed" .
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