Whatever is fickle, freckled, who knows how...

Two of the poems in Dappled Things really stood out for me this time, for very different reasons. My favorite poem in the issue is Gabriel Olearnik's English Apocalypse, which pleases with alarmingly whimsical eschatology, more Douglas Adams than John the Evangelist - right up until the tiger-pounce of the ending. Very well done. The other poem can't realistically be called good, but when you account for the author's age - 17 - you see that it's enormously promising. Timothy Barr's The Paschal Four is about birth, passion, death, and resurrection. After that, don't ask me what's going on in it. It reads like a bubbling farrago of Francis Thompson and Dylan Thomas, with the grandiose touches that you expect from a high school poet ("Nightish bastion," "My soul rejects the hero’s fate," etc.). But anyone who can write a line as riveting and odd as "Fugues fly from pipes veiled in my spine" is up to something. This aspiring poet has a strong instinct for the harmonious arrangement of vowels and for the feeling of a four-stress meter - although he can't decide on whether it is trochaic tetrameter, iambic tetrameter, or a four-stress accentual meter. Attention and practice will get rid of the metrical awkwardness, and hopefully the clotted imagery will become more vivid and intelligible. One fault that's easy to identify, if not to correct, is the Missing Article. It is apparent from the opening lines: "When in subtle mass I weighed, / Latent boughs kicked fleshy drum." Three nouns here, all without articles. The poet could have gotten away with the first two, but the third is intolerable and it seems to expose the other two epithets to the same sense of surfeit. It's true that Hopkins liked to omit the article, thinking it colorless; but he concealed his art. Here, the lines are so swollen with imagery that the articles have simply been washed out, like water from an overflowing bathtub. But all this aside, "The Paschal Four" manages to be the most intriguing poem in the issue. It is not content to be fashionably plain-spoken and understated. It wants to sing, loudly. So I hope that Barr will keep writing and "brace sterner that strain."