Peer Review: Richard Hogue

Richard’s poem “Before and After: West Africa mourning her children” is one of the best poems I have reviewed for this class so far.  It is about an African woman mourning the loss of her son, told backwards in a series of how she remembered each moment taking place back to before he was even conceived.  What I really like about this poem is how Richard repeats the same words “before” and “I” respectively at the beginning of each line, it gives the poem a sense of recollection which works well as the mother comes to terms of her sons life and eventual death.  My favorite lines of the poem are the last two, “before that he lived in the heart of God / (as he does now)”.  These two lines bring the poem full circle by going all the way back to before the child was conceived, just as someone in “the heart of God” and how “he does now” and will live eternally in God’s holy kingdom.  This to me gives the poem and for that part, the mother, a sense of closure and peace, now that she knows her child is free of pain and he himself is at peace as well.  I think this is a fantastic poem and the only thing I would say about it is I wish that Richard submitted this poem for workshop so the whole class would have gotten to see how wonderful it is, and while the material, although tragic, does bring joy to the reader knowing that the mother is grateful to have had him.