Abbay’s poem “Collections of Childhood Memories” reads like the old childhood rhyme that used what you expected the last word of each stanza to be, as the first word in a totally new stanza. I love the three stand-alone lines of the poem that work as bridges between stanzas that would otherwise feel odd placed after one another.
The imagery is my favorite rhetorical device in this poem. The line ‘trying to run in oversized slippers’ paints a vivid and funny picture in my head, and the line ‘Now my toe is crooked like the way a sailboat tacks’ had me smiling after I looked up on Wikipedia what it meant, and I was presented with a few different picture – all of which I was imagining as someone’s toe.
My only big problem with this poem, and I know this is most attributed to the prompt itself, is that some of the similes don’t make much sense to me. The simile “uneven like the crosshatching of an amateur artist” was okay on it’s own, but the following line of, “That wishes for extra money” didn’t feel like it fit. My only thought was that maybe it’s uneven because he rushed through it trying to just be able to sell it for money. The other simile that was lost on me was, “sticking to the particles like grenadine.” I know grenadine is sticky, but I feel like there are thousands of things that are sticky, is there something else that could give more meaning to the comparison? For the most part though, I really enjoyed the similes.
And my last critique is that capitalization and punctuation are not consistent throughout; they almost seem just scattered in periodically. Changing them to be more regular would help augment the flow of the poem.