The Death Spread Poem Analysis

The poem that I reviewed this week is called, “The Death Spread” by Tyler Brewington and I found it on versedaily.org on 5/09/16. In summary, this poem is about death and the uncomfortable yet beautiful images it can invoke. While reading this poem I had to reread several lines over and over again simply because I liked them so much. A few lines that stood out to me were, “The skeleton of a calf's been wrapped around a pipe”, “A yolk slides down the drain”, and “You drive into the Wyoming part of you where it's obvious there have been some sacrifices” – all of these lines throughout this poem are vivid and give off a sense of loss. A dead baby animal represents something nipped in the bud, a yolk sliding down a drain is a fast and hopeless loss that can’t be recovered (without being messy anyway), and seeing sacrifices on a drive represents the loss of something important during the course of life. All of the images throughout this poem pulled on my heartstrings and were pieced together into a relatable format with pictures of food, animals, and rustic imagery, i.e. a plastic jug of milk, an egg yolk, flamingos, white dogs, horses, Wyoming, missile silos, tornados, bottoms of lakes, etc. And my favorite part of this poem that really caught me off guard, sealed the deal, and made me want to write this response, was the way the poem ended. The lines, “Everyone who ever knew you gently roams the town at the bottom of a lake - They flash to the surface,
sometimes, and you see them - You name them without worry - You up to your shoulders in love”. These ending lines caught me off guard because of there warmth. Images of people you know and love up to your shoulders, made me think of heaven and that even though so many bad things happened in the narrators life, some sort of solitude and peace was found at the end of it all. And the way this poem is structured in a line by line format, draws out these series of events in a strenuous fashion and really makes the reader ponder what is going on in the narrators mind. Also, the way the narrator uses the word “you” throughout the poem makes us as readers think about these scenarios from our own perspective, merging in our own life experiences into the lines as we read through – this method of writing is interesting and something that has inspired me to try in possible poems that I write. In conclusion, I really enjoyed reading this poem and writing this response.
The shift in images from the beginning to the ending of the poem served as a useful example in showing me how to switch the tone of a poem with grace (I was thinking about my condom poem in this instance) and how to structure lines and words in a way that make the reader think. All in all, Brewington hits the nail on the head with this poem by delivering a prepossessing story of life, death, and all the odd portions
in-between.