23. Rita Dove, "All Souls'"

There are two ways of looking at this poem. You could see it as a pretty good "New Yorker" style poem, fitting nicely that space of page above or between the articles. It presents a re-visioning of a mythic scene, Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise, with some well-chosen details. The animals are not your standard Lions and sheep, but "mink, gander, and marmoset, / crow and cockatiel." There are some elegant turns of phrases, and the poem ends on an Ashberyian note "as if straining / to make out the words of a song / played long ago, in a foreign land."

The other approach would be to find fault with the banality and or pseudo-profundity of some of the phrasing: "Of course the world had changed / for good." "Before them, a silence / larger than all ignorance." I don't understand the use of "et cetera" in the line "grief and confusion, et cetera." It's hard to use a phrase that's essentially "filler" in a poetically effective manner, unless it is ironic, as in Creeley's poem about the dishonest mailman!

This is what I mean by mediocre poetry. Not bad, not "How could the New Yorker publish that!", but rather, nothing particularly embarrassing, a justifiable poem.

I should add that this type of poem is typical of a kind of "creative writing" classroom excercise. Imagine a mythological scene in your own words. Isn't this an invitation to banality, in a way, since the student isn't going to be able to compete with Milton? Modern day retellings can flatten out all that grandeur.

I'll give this one a 7.