Thursday, January 19, 2012

"How did I get into this ... great big nutshell?"

The Roundhouse Voices - Dave Smith

In a nutshell:

There's a guy who practiced baseball with his uncle a lot, and the uncle died, and now he's having an identity crisis.

"I'm here/ though this is a day I did not want to see," provides the only bit of enjambement in the poem, which I can only imagine to be a short of shift in tone to one more directly melancholy. "Mick" is an allusion to Mickey Mantle, who I have learned from Google is a baseball legend, so that makes sense. I am as yet unsure of the significance of the roundhouse, which is like a shed. Maybe the speaker is in the roundhouse, and he's recalling those voices asking him who he is and maybe something his uncle said to him. The "box of silk" is a euphemism for a casket, and "the sun that made its glove soft on my hand" is personification. "I see myself like a burning speck/ of cinder come down the hill and through a tunnel/ of porches," is a simile.

No comments:

Post a Comment