Twenty-one lines with no wasted material. The paper conceit holds across four transformations and never has to be explained, and “paper agreements / in fading ink / cut and bleed”...
The coinage alone justifies the poem. Unlanguage identifies a real thing that ordinary vocabulary handles badly, and the definition David gives it is exact enough to be borrowed. Writers invent...
A well-controlled poem with one genuinely strong image sustained the whole way through. The orbital conceit never breaks, and the verbs cooperate with it consistently enough that the vertigo becomes...
One of the most fully realised poems David has written. It takes a throwaway compliment and builds a coherent world out of it, and every element in that world does...
The first line and the last two are good. Everything between them is the same thought explained at greater length and lower pressure. “Satisfaction is private / and godly” is...
The mantra is a genuinely good piece of construction and always was — a cumulative ladder where each rung is reasonable and the total is punishing. Forty years on it...
A domestic poem that finds something larger without straining for it. The renovation conceit is ordinary by design, and David resists every opportunity to inflate it — no meditation on...
Ten lines, and nine of them are setup. That ratio would sink most poems; here it’s the mechanism. The proverb has to be fully assembled before the parenthesis can knock...
Warm, generous, and considerably plainer than David’s usual work. That plainness is a choice rather than a lapse — a poem meant to be sent to someone who needs it...
The final movement is the best thing in the poem and one of the more significant moments in the catalog. Slowing the lightning bolt — the image that has always...
Where “Caustic Revelation” tried four endings, this poem uses its four sections as a progression and lands once. The blood-to-rust chemistry is a genuine conceit rather than a decoration, and...
The confession at the centre is the most direct thing David has written, and the shadow imagery organising it is genuinely well built — zenith to silhouette, light withheld to...
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.
