I am still searching for another example of this instance, but my favorite moment in Natasha Trethewey’s poetry so far happens in “Southern Gothic,” lines 10 to 15. The first two lines, “The lines in my young father’s face deepen/ toward an expression of grief” come across to me as an effect. The lines that follow this are the cause: “I have come home/ from the schoolyard with the words that shadow us/ in this small Southern town.” As I said, I can’t find another instance of this yet, but I really adore this move. By giving us the effect and then the cause, the cause bears more weight. During initial reading, we don’t know that the cause was coming first, so the strategy contrasts with what we expect. Now that we’ve moved through the effect, we come upon the cause and it hits harder than if the instance were reversed. This strategy stands out for me because I’ve never noticed it in a work before, though I assume Trethewey didn’t create it.
Script Folio 43 Split pomegranate, common rhinoceros beetle, Scarlet Turks='s cap lily folding back it's red lips while anthers circle the pistil's one hand: above them six lines are written in chancery script with lettere tagliate , letters cut like the long lines of pasta our parents cut on our plate, the work of two people who never met. The two halves of each letter--below and above-- are severed or sewn together by inked chain links like those that knot a fence or a stitch that unravels the whole length of a sentence if a stray thread is pulled--chain letter, chain gang, chain mail, chain saw-- or those paper links that wrap themselves around the Xmas tree: eentsy weentsy spider sidling up to each letter, each word, casting and binding in silk as if to ravel and unravel once felt the same. ---------------------------- Food Foods were eaten like the grossness our parents turned into freedom tickets away from the kitchen table, the alteration of rules we didn’t know exis...
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