Week 5, Reading Response 1

Nails

are held in the mouth
of a gun and splinter pines
or stab flashing, metal superior
in its point. They get hit
or pounded to hold up
collector plates or families.
Our house's nails recognize
one another in their sharpness,
know the weight they carry—
they will outlast us,
and the timbers above us,
those little pikes cleaving
one to another as you
sleep on your side,
and I lie awake in our bed
while what is between us
gathers, galvanizes
into something I can strike.

(Nails, a poem from "Pretty Little Rooms", by Katie Chaple)

The imagery in this poem is very vivid, which is what caught my attention as I was reading the first few lines of all the poems in the book; you can almost hear the creak of a house's foundation as you read it. I like the transition between settings, and how they're all images of town life (a wooden house, church, family, ...).

The use of strong verbs (stab, hit, pound, cleave, strike) reinforce the feeling of... frustration, I would say, that overall the poem gives me. The poem doesn't shy away from multi-syllabic words but, like we see over and over again, they are used very carefully so as to not mellow down the poem too much. I want to get that balance down, as I still tend to favour latinate words a bit too much (after all, they're my main vocabulary, coming from a romance-speaking household).

The poem clearly shows the triggering subject/generated object dynamic, and exemplifies a very proper use of it, with the hammering of nails leading to relationship tension. I like how the poem is a discourse at the main voice's partner, with numerous "our" and "us", which left me feeling almost like an intruder in some private blurb I was not meant to read.