Hi! Thank you so much for your amazing critique, this is beyond even what I expected from this subreddit so I have to thank you for going into such depth. Not only that, your stylish comments are a joy to read! You are 100% helpful and valid, and have prompted me to continue to agonise over how to broaden the accessibilty of a deliberately difficult approach. Thank you again for your time and care with this piece :))

 Part 2 of 2
 
> Laminate flooring…stare,
 
Jump in focus to someplace inside and two people that read in a tumultuous relationship. Cleaved is one of of those great words, right? Cut or stuck together. But where is the focus here? At first it seems about the floors and what is hidden. Then there is this introduction of a “his” and martial not marital. War/fighting in between sleeping and back seats (“taking a back seat” or back seat as the high school make-out in a car?) And then we switch to fire-intensity stare. Still I am starting to put together certain threads involving relationship between two individuals overlayed with a relationship between a person and a place and a place and the flora. Okay?
 
> as round our blazing fires we throng, 
awake…lands. 
 
So the “him” and “I” are now joined as “we” and “our” but I’m not really feeling any blazing fires and throng makes me think of large crowds not two, so is this we more than the I and he? Because it just keeps jumping focus and n

Part 1 of 2
 
Thank you for posting. We don’t often get poetry and I am not the best at critiquing it, but I’ll give this a go. This is just a random internet voice though, so take everything as just one fairly subjective perspective. I am not a botanist, but I am familiar with a lot of the technical funky jargon.
 
**Overall** On initial quick read the language itself did not draw me into the poem, but felt like a deliberate impenetrable wall with architectural details involving intricate gilded crenulated edifices with balustrades and embrasures and some Bánánach with a shillelagh. On subsequent reads, I sensed a personal metaphor embedded too deeply that played back and forth between an interpersonal relationship and arboreal holly shenanigans. Problem is that in order to breech this without a cipher clearly positioning things, the idea was too obtuse for me to get it either smoothly and the words, references, did not for me reading have a poetic-lyrical flow (either sound or cerebr

Thanks for this! The detail in which you describe your responses to the poem is fantastic and makes for really ideal feedback. Thank you for your time and sensitivity, and happy New Year to yourself!

Thanks for posting this. It's so different, and in some ways a breath of fresh air.

Having said that, I in no way feel equipped to do a decent review, but I do like and read poetry - a friend is a published poet, I go to her readings and happily drink the free wine, and Kate Tempest is a favourite author of mine, albeit a much more straightforward and accessible narrative poet. I wanted to read yours a few times and think about it to do it justice. So I'll be coming at this from a rather naive perspective, but not totally uninformed, I hope.

I'll just say it like I see it and feel it.

The start, I seem to have the same issue with the egg-washed brush, in that it takes me straight to pastry, and a distant second to painting. I'm not sure whether that's what you want right at the second line.

But then you have

>propagating athwart my dark, defended,  
>  
>dim, block;

which I loved, the rhythm of the words ticking and coming to a literal block at the end. A pleasure to read and par

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