I love poetry, but sometimes it frustrates me in the way it inevitably falls short, language unable to measure up to reality. Good poetry is a good approximation of the real world, but it’s still an approximation. Ada Limón’s “The End of Poetry” rejects that approximation — or, at least, it approximates a rejection (how…
I came across the poem “On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses” by James Galvin first published in The Iowa Review. Upon first reading it, I was moved by the poem and appreciated the nostalgic tone Galvin instills in each word. The personification of the wedding dresses “weeping in their closets” was beautiful; the comparison of the dresses to women who were separated from and left by their husbands or just living through unhappy marriages was intriguing. The dresses were described as “luminescent with hopeless longing,/like hollow angels,” unwanted and under-appreciated since the days of their glory. This sad description prepares…
ashberyland 