Alright, love. Sal forwarded your email requesting a review for the item you placed with in the June round of her contest. I usually write really long reviews, but I'm going to keep this short if possible. It's a long piece, so I'll focus where needed.
What Caught My Eye
The "undermining of the moss" is the first line that really sold me on this poem. I adore it.
Favorite Aspects
There are plenty of other snippets that are good though. Some great imagery in here. Other examples: "lodge silver / maggots in crystal" and "Bitten by teethless shells" (which would normally be 'toothless' even plural, but I like it anyway).
Language / Word Choice
There are some oddities throughout, which I attribute to the translation/native language thing. They're not a really big deal for the most part, but the meaning gets muddy at times.
Lines two and three, for instance... what was hidden and held into her? Since you don't say what you're talking about in the first three lines, there is no hook. The first line is intriguing, the next two are an incomplete thought that are nicely phrased but missing key information.
"She would be nailed onto wooden cross pillars
And growing under green roller blinds."
This seems to be a common "what's that mean?" moment throughout... the -ING makes no sense grammatically. Do you mean "She would be nailed and grow" or "pillars grow green" or growing under blinds, she would be nailed"? The "and" throws me because grammatically, it doesn't work. Grammar tells us what to expect and how to interpret words... here, the clues are off.
Anywhere you see "-ING", I would check for clarity. "Softly flooding hurting her measures" should have a comma between the two. "A mole's way repleted gripping"... is 'repleted gripping' a thing, or are they different thoughts? I don't understand how a "way" could be both replete and gripping, but that's what it says. Perhaps "gripping towards the light, the mole"? In short-- "replete" describes the "way" and "gripping toward the light" describes the mole?
These are the types of things I found throughout. The clarity is a problem. I have had to read some of it quite a few times to figure out what you're talking about. Don't feel bad though... for the most part, these are the types of mistakes that some English-as-a-first-language people have problems with. Say, the 'replete gripping'? If I'm understanding it correctly, that is just a dangling modifier... I see them constantly.
Effect
Okay, so I didn't do a great job of keeping this short. It happens. Congrats on the 2nd place win, love. Yours was one of my favorites. Sure, it has problems, but it is a stunning draft. Your truly stunning phrases here are better than any others in the contest, in my view. And the fact that it's a translation and utilizes interesting word choice? Impressive, if a bit "thesaurus vomit" at times, no offense. Sometimes, "sad" serves you better than "disconsolate"... you don't want people to be exhausted by the time they finish, right?
So... 5 stars for effort. 2.5 stars for the readability of the current draft. I'd say that ranks about 3.5 in total. And a fine piece of work well worth the time it will take to polish it.
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