Reading and Making 'Metaphor Poems' by Simile & Rhyme
IN VITRO: Synopsis
In Vitro: New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11 is a collection of 88 lyric and narrative poems composed since 2001. The sonnet predominates, followed by rhyme royal, tersa rima, narrative couplets and a sestina. They create a mosaic resembling a memoir and a journey toward a more full consciousness and mindfulness on the part of the personae represented. The U.S. eastern seaboard furnishes most settings. The book is divided into six sections:
“I: Reprise — Weighing in with Papa” starts with a loss that is incomprehensible to the child persona, and closes with the beginnings of coming to terms with it as a young man in search of his life’s work just prior to the beginning of his college years.
“II: Scotsman’s Prophecy” begins with a poem occasioned by a romantic meeting in Athens, Ohio, and courtship in Boston, Massachusetts. It continues with pieces on living, working and helping to raise two children in Hartford, Connecticut, and closes on one facing retirement.
“III: Wood Splitter with Maul and Wedges” presents poems that closely observe nature and express care for conserving the environment, together with a number of pieces exploring philosophical and metaphysical concerns for our planet Earth and man’s future on it.
“IV: Astral Wings” opens with poems critical of the patriarchal values taken for granted in our society. The balance of this section delves into metaphysical questions lying beyond the five senses, using as metaphors some of the more well-known constructs of modern physics.
“V: Stonewalk Journey” begins with an elegy constructed in a seven-sonnet sequence on the death of the poet’s best friend from school days. Another recalls a visit to Yale University’s Mesopotamia Collection of cuneiform artifacts. Other poems in this section are meditations on new understandings of the origins of mankind resulting from Zecharia Sitchin’s life-long work in translating and interpreting the cuneiform tablets of Sumerian Civilization dug up in Iraq.
“VI: Invitation to Negative Space” is a section of lyric invitations to artists and poets, urging them to consider the sources of their creativity, and to rejoice fearlessly in their exercise.
An epilogue, “Tweezed in Vitro,” brings the reader around to a full understanding of the prologue and furnishes additional layered meaning to the title and contents of the book.
In sum, this is a stimulating, provocative read whose principal benefits are that it enables you the reader to reach into that level of consciousness that makes you uniquely you with your own place at the table of the family of man.
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