Sound and silence are important. On page 24, Mary Oliver makes a great comparison of 2 nouns, synonyms, with different sounds: stone and rock. She can see the smooth roundness of "stone." She can see the jagged edges of "rock."
Poets of every level: Can you think of other examples of nouns that have similar meaning but contain different sounds?
During a Triangle Sisters in Crime Zoom call, I asked a question about Thriller/Mystery/Horror novels using deus ex machina, god out of the machine: an ending that isn't prepared for by the author(s).
2054, a thriller I read over the past few days, seems to demonstrate my point. The novel begins with the President of the United States dying from remote manipulation of his DNA. During the autopsy, the surgeon finds the President's heart has been altered remotely.
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Raymond Kurzweil and his Singularity, the combination of biology and technology are referenced.
Update: p 253 Sarah Hunt achieved Kurzweil's Singularity. She put obstacles in the way to prevent any scientist achieving a second advent of the Singularity. Explains the alteration of the previous president's heart. [However, at the end of the novel, it seems that . . . well, the Kurzweil premise doesn't exist! Seems like deus ex machina!. I looked at the Amazon reviews: no reader seemed to pick up on it. I need to look at Goodreads reviews next.]
Stanza 2
The golden eagle, for instance,
has a heaviness in him
moreover the huge barns
seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off
toward the deeper grass.
What does the poet gain from using "for instance" and "moreover?"
1. the 2 are more appropriate in prose. In many ways, Ghosts is a prose poem. In addition, the 2 are denotative language, which ground the reader in prose. The 2 prepare the reader for the later beautiful metaphors.
2. the two set off the assonance of the "seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off."
Stanza 7
What does the poet achieve by using "of, in, to"?
Throughout the poem the poet's achievement is settled in the brilliant use of language and image. She writes of the extinction of buffalo, bawling beasts, yellow-eyed wolves. A lesser poet would have started by naming the animals. Oliver refrains, in several sense of the word. The front rhyme of "of, in, to," is abc, bbc, ba.
