Beauty and Violence

But poetry is its own remove, and Rekdal?s description is full of barely contained excitement, the adjectives reaching over line-breaks for their nouns twice in the first three lines, runs of heavily stressed syllables rattling against each other, as in ?smolt fume smacks against glass,? with its intricate networks of matching and opposing consonants and vowels. (Say it out loud, paying attention to the ways your lips, tongue, and vocal cords move.) And then the relief that starts to set in after ?the way,? including a few runs of iambic regularity (?the vessels/ can return to dock,? ?rise and fall along the weirs?), an orderliness that?s much more vibrant than the sanitizing order it describes.

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