This was by far one of my absolute favorites. The imagery was beautiful, as were the metaphors. The whole poem is basically about a father who works at a steel mill, and he brings home scraps of metal for his "garden". He brings them home for his children, more or less to share his creations and findings with them.
"He would pick flowers for us: small gears and cogwheels
With teeth like petals..."
The image of a metal steampunk-esque flower is so clear in that one line that I can vividly see an older man, bending over to hand the "flower" to one of his kids--little girls, I imagine.
My absolute favorite line is found in the very beginning, when the narrator was describing the father's job:
"Boiled against furnace wall in wait for his lance
To pierce the fireclay and set loose demons
And dragons in molted tons, blazing
Down to the huge satanic caldrons..."
I absolutely adore the fantasy aspect used in those lines; how the narrator brought in things from a child's imagination. When the father brought up what he did for a living to his kids, they probably imagined just that--a place with dragons spewing molten fire, where demons lived and thrived within the flames. I can't get enough of that. Tis just amazingly beautiful.
I entirely agree with you. I was deterred by the title initially, but the first line threw away my assumptions and intrigued me. It used such interesting language: "lance," "rockeries," "grottoes," etc., and avoided loaded terms that would make it overly-dramatic. The metaphor of the garden was unifying but didn't smack you in the face, and it was just awesome. The first stanza made me think of the hobbit. :)
ReplyDelete