City Eclogue Part 2

So just like the first half of the book, the spacing is a little weird. In some poems it would have two lines and then without completing the thought until the next stanza, the author would put a lot of space. I noticed that in this half Ed Roberson used a lot more punctuation along with the odd spacing, unlike in the first half of the book when he rarely put any punctuation and just used the weird spacing to help the reader gather their thoughts before they continued on reading. I also felt like in the first half the author was more direct about the subjects of each poem. It was easy for the reader to tell what the poem was trying to say, while in the second half, I had a hard time trying to understand the subject of some of the poems.

One poem that I found particularly interesting was on page 121. The title of it is Escape Training: Instructor's Flying Rappel. At the beginning I thought it was related to somebody who taught rock climbing because of the first few lines, "I jump backwards off the cliff to show how it's done: one   two footsteps hit off the face of the rock then I land.." When I think about this line, I can picture an actual rock climbing instructor demonstrating how to use the rope and trust the rope while doing this activity. Towards the end of the poem my thinking took a turn. "You can't hold a note forever you run out of breath   you run out of rope    There's a limit to all of our maneuvers." This line reminded me of human life. We can't live forever, eventually our "rope" will run out, so there is a limit on what we can do in that lifespan.

There was also a second poem that I believe I understood. Not Brought Up on page 123 was about racism. "..was the numbers of people we wanted justice brought down upon --- that many gone along keeping silent kept in office for---" Even though people knew that bad things were going on towards African Americans they didn't take any action against it. Possibly in fear of being hurt themselves or even killed. Instead of putting them and their families in danger they stayed quiet and just let the torture happen. "The lynchings each   of the thousands of times it happened the whole white town come down  to a smokey picnic.." Many African Americans were lynched just because of their skin color and some whites would even burn their houses down just to run them and their families out of town.