High craft applied to a single joke, held for thirty-eight lines without a break in character. Heels on tile like a hammer cocking is first-rate and lands in line two,...
Compressed and genuinely cold, and the best of it is a refusal to stand outside the thing being satirized. I take the same mortal step happily puts the poet in...
Architecturally the strongest short poem in the recent work. Two mirrors bracket it, a bathroom mirror with her standing behind him and a rear-view mirror where he asks whether she...
The most ambitious construction in the recent work, and the ambition is earned through technical accuracy. Consommé is stock clarified by an egg raft that traps whatever is clouding it,...
Well built and warm, with an architecture doing most of the work. Eight lines of comparative zoology, a two-line pivot, four lines of resolution, and the pivot lands precisely where...
One line does nearly all the work here, and it is strong enough to justify the poem built around it. A miracle is not supernatural performs a genuine substitution, preserving...
Compact, and smarter than its length lets on. The pivot on Fortunately is the achievement: one word, alone on its line, converting a complaint about being held at a distance...
Ambitious and uneven, with the strongest passages very strong. The camp inventory is the high point: a whole cattle outfit going quiet, rendered through sound alone, closing on a chuckwagon...
The structure is the achievement. A poem titled nocturne that opens before dawn, says goodnight in its second stanza, and says good morning near the end has scrambled its own...
The title is the achievement. Turning viral from the language of disease into the language of hope organizes everything beneath it, and a weaker poem would have stopped to explain...
Economical and controlled. Sixteen lines with nothing wasted, and the central move, grieving a night that never happened, is performed without being explained. That restraint is the harder choice and...
The most structurally ambitious of the reflective poems in this batch, and the ambition mostly pays. Building a taxonomy of faith and ordering it as a descent from private to...
An aphorism rather than a poem, and it should be judged as one. On those terms it is well made: the will/skill internal rhyme is memorable, the two words’ near-identical...
A poem built almost entirely from hands, and the physical accuracy is what gives it authority. “Cut the back of one / and it bleeds like crazy” is the kind...
The lighter of the two pronoun poems, and the more charming for it. Where “Asymmetry” diagrammed the argument, this one plays it out — tumbling in the grass rather than...
A concise poem with one genuinely good structural idea: using pronouns as the literal machinery of division and union, and watching them change one word at a time. The contemporary...
A self-aware poem that turns its own repetition into its subject, which is the right move for a motif the catalog has run three times now. Naming itself a reprise,...
A compact poem organized around one well-chosen word. Confluence does a great deal of work here — it supplies the title, the central image, and the poem’s argument that art...
The poem the whole catalog has been circling. Stating outright that the Muse is not a literary device is a risk — it invites the reader to test the claim...
A clever occasional piece that hides its arithmetic well. Building the number seven out of two winks and five twitches, rather than stating it, is a genuine bit of construction,...
Built on evidence rather than assertion, which distinguishes it. The poem shows her at a grave and giving a rose to an enemy, then draws a conclusion from those two...
The structure is the achievement. Opening on a young man’s unanswered question in 1945 and answering it ninety years later in the same poem gives the piece a reach that...
Comic verse with real craft under the jokes. The sustained size-fourteen pun could have worn thin and instead keeps finding new places to land — gator, shoe, and the parenthetical...
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.
