A poem whose intellectual ambition—redefining a word—is more interesting than its formal execution, and that’s not a criticism so much as a description of what the poem chooses to prioritize....
A poem that chooses a formal register—end-rhymed couplets, regular meter, hymn-like repetition—and commits to it without apology. In a catalog that typically operates in free verse with deliberate structural looseness,...
One of the most formally accomplished and emotionally devastating poems in the catalog—a piece that makes absence more powerful than presence and silence louder than speech. The eight-stanza “I have...
A poem whose formal constraint—the triple-beat adjective pattern—is both its discipline and its limitation, and the balance between the two determines whether the reader experiences it as incantation or inventory....
A poem that earns its closing formal display by grounding it in a specific human moment—someone asks a casual question, and the poet’s mind drops through the floor into a...
A poem that converts self-deprecation into self-discovery through the sustained wax metaphor—burnt candle to literary inadequacy to moon phase—and arrives at a closing image so quietly perfect it redeems every...
A poem that performs one of the catalog’s most impressive tonal feats: beginning as a comic anecdote about blowing a spider off a mirror and ending as a genuine meditation...
A poem that operates more as philosophical notation than lyric—five sentences from a designer’s journal that, upon rereading, reveal themselves as a compressed theory of creative relationships. The mapping of...
A poem that packs a remarkable amount of philosophical weight into five lines. The butterfly-effect opening is the poem’s strongest contribution—by equating a smile with the perturbation that reshapes complex...
A poem that covers enormous emotional ground—mortality, cognitive decline, missed opportunity, Easter resurrection, the persistence of beauty past death—in thirty lines without ever feeling rushed. The opening three-line sequence (life...
The anaphoric repetition of “Five” is the poem’s engine, and it runs cleanly for thirteen stanzas without stalling—a formal achievement that depends on each stanza offering a genuinely different perspective...
The catalog’s most radically compressed poem—thirteen lines, essentially thirteen words, and a complete cosmology. The one-word-per-line structure gives each term the weight of a chapter title, a station of the...
A poem that earns its place in the catalog less through formal achievement than through mythological contribution—”The Core Buzz” is a phrase the catalog has been circling without naming, and...
A poem that earns its closing reveal through the patience of its setup—two full paragraphs of garden description before the third-paragraph pivot to “you.” The time-lapse structure (planted → overgrown...
A poem whose structural intelligence—storm to calm to storm, each cycle reframed—carries more weight than its individual lines suggest on first reading. The decision to return to thunder after the...
A poem that finds genuine tenderness inside a seemingly trivial subject—a chocolate bar—by following the metaphor far enough to discover something real about shared experience and emotional overflow. The Pound...
The most compressed poem in the catalog that achieves genuine philosophical weight—five lines that contain a complete argument about beauty, permanence, art, and the gap between representation and reality. The...
A poem that proves ten lines and one sentence can carry genuine emotional weight when every line break is load-bearing. The single-sentence structure is the formal decision that makes the...
A poem that turns the smallest possible starting point—a single toe—into a journey across the entire human body and into the cosmos, and makes the ascent feel earned rather than...
A poem that accomplishes its purpose with the economy of a proverb—eight lines, four stages, one argument, zero waste. The syntactic parallelism is the poem’s formal engine: by keeping the...
A poem that earns its emotional impact through directness rather than imagery. The negation-then-affirmation structure (not weak → strong; not cold → warm) gives each body part a small dramatic...
A poem that achieves genuine delicacy through restraint—twelve lines, no digressions, no self-deprecation, no comic relief, just weather and a woman. The decision to let the fog and sun do...
A poem that succeeds through the honesty of its process rather than the polish of its execution. The stream-of-consciousness method—trying doors, banging heads, cataloging possibilities, sliding sentences left and right—mirrors...
A poem that earns its punchline by making the reader forget one is coming. The four quatrains are so deliberately simple—fairy-tale rhythm, nursery-rhyme scheme, children’s-book narrative—that the reader settles into...
A poem that earns its gentleness by meaning every word of it. In a catalog that frequently operates at high emotional voltage—fire, lightning, synesthesia, cosmic expansion—”Dreams” is the quiet room...
A poem that succeeds through charm rather than architecture—the catalog of French culture is delivered with such infectious enthusiasm that the reader forgets the poem promised a philosophical meditation and...
A poem whose subtitle carries more weight than the body initially suggests. The revelation that “TO” is the word never spoken reframes a straightforward catalog of aspirations into something more...
A poem that operates effectively in two distinct modes and earns the transition between them. The opening lyric is among the most imagistically concentrated passages in the catalog: the eclipse-corona...
The "Taste of Honey" page features ratings of David's poems. The ratings are organized in batches from David's most recent poems at the front to his earliest submissions at the back. You can use the page number and date buttons below the boxed content to navigate. Recommended for use when browsing. You can also locate ratings for David's poems by visiting the Poetry Blog, selecting a poem and clicking on the "Ratings" tab. Recommended for use when reviewing specific poems.
