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.
