Analysis Of Dorianne Laux's Facts About The Moon

Dorianne Laux’s Facts about the Moon is a confessional read driven by original everyday images or topics that act as igniters to a specific memory or theme she is implying. The poetry is consistent with being smart, fierce, lyrical, and gorgeous. Layered figurative imagery, music, a narrative impulse that engages human and animal worlds, family, faith, the lack of and is powerful in its restrained and strategic balance between image and utterance. These poems interconnect as episodic or vignette ventures of the world, chopped up images that are frozen and looked under a microscope. The episodic nature takes its full advantage as the poems are broken up into chapters counted off by stars that each have their own unique themes or messages. For …show more content…
In the sixteen line poem, Sisters, Laux describes a pair of sibling children playing in a homemade fort in an effort to distract themselves from the real world. This display of children delving deep in their imagination works great for the delivery of the more mature material at the poems conclusion which has direct ties to an earlier poem in this section, It Must Have Been Summer. Laux expertly uses the short lines and takes advantage of enjambment keeping the flow moving as well as ending on strong end words. Some of her end words consisting of, light, fort, beautiful, dead, and beast. Not only are these strong end words but they imply a certain emotion and message that enhances the poems initial delivery. For example, the end word beautiful stands out perfect in the lines beginning word Pretending. This creates a polarity and a voice in the poem that seeks to be in an opposite situation then they currently are in, but by the way the end words are placed the emotion delivered is very desperate. This use of short lines and end words delivery such strong emotion gives Laux the advantage to use very formal language. The connectivity this has with, It Must Have Been Summer, is that the perspective has shifted to the pedophiles daughter’s collective voice. They are all trying to escape from the reality that their father has created and a reality that they are starting to realize to shape, their father is a pedophile and they are ashamed. This connectivity narratively is a great use of the collection as well as a great way to expand your voice on a matter without writing one elongated poem but breaking it up into pieces and spreading it out throughout the poem pacing its heavy material for the readers. The introduction of the father as the beast is a wonderful description but what drives such a description is