Daniel Rounds

"The dating here puts things squarely in a kind of romantic tradition, where the poet is telling us, OK, here are some times of day, and here is as accurate a transcription of the state of my soul as I can/am going to give. There is a disregard for rational thought in such a precise timing of the natural world, in a sense, the poet is saying, I am governed entirely by the natural world, the flow of my thoughts is exactly timed to the passage of time. Indeed, by quoting us these times, we are made constantly aware of this natural rhythm passing through the poem and in contrast to the text itself, which is going to -- as we'll see -- mix up time, produce a narrative that follows the processes of the human mind, bending and stretching the axis.

This distortion of time comes out most clearly in the third section, where the repetition of the line creates a sense of attention, of a slowing of time as the mind focuses down onto the event in question; this explicit slowing gives the lie to the apparent regularity of nature's -- as opposed to man's -- clock.

We have to wonder a little bit about the narrative here: why does the beloved disappear? Rounds has a second 'migraine' poem, and the conceit of the loved one as a migraine that compells a medical attention (again the timing) while at the same time resisting that very kind of attention (again the back and forth there) is really just brilliant and deserves a whole series. In a sense, there is going to be this tension, if you analogize the beloved to some internal mental state, about the separation between I and thee. How much is a migraine a separate phenomenon from the consciousness itself? How can the beloved be prevented from being absorbed into the speaker?

The surprising twist of Rounds' work here is that the absorption of the beloved (the disappearance of 'you' in the final stanza) accompanies a bodily estrangement where the eyes have their sockets, and live now separately from the speaker himself. Like a lot of the better poems I've reviewed here on the blog in the past two months, [migraine like a roach] has a consciousness of the body as having a life and domain of action separate from the mind."

(Simon DeDeo, rhubarb is susa – Flash reviews of individual poems from Simon DeDeo, February 21, 2005)