Talk:Hell in a Basket/@comment-4097182-20131006171020

A few intial thoughts on reading Hell in a Basket:

1) The quality of the pieces was good; there wasn't one poem I thought Little shouldn't have published. That, and the small size, makes me think the author rigorously selected from a much larger body of work, and he deserves kudos for that.

2) I'm not a fan of confessional poetry to begin with, so this didn't move me a lot. Still, I identified with much of it: the idea in "True Hate" of burning the family home reminded me of a poem of mine, "My Father's House," where I expressed the same idea.

3) The homoerotic bits read OK to me, as in most cases I could simply imagine them as hetero sex. Still, I think they're a big plus. From the outside, it looks as though there's a big, mutually supportive gay poets' community in the U.S., and it would be to the author's value to plug into it. (Of course I don't know whom he''d have to sleep with to do that ).

4) Intriguing words or phrases would jump out at me. like the alliteration in "Weaved in from my sins / Like wicker / With little Wiccan ties". While I didn't at first like the rhyming in "Gum Wrapper", I grew to appreciate it as automatic association (as if the speaker, finding his partner is cheating, is losing it).

5) My favourite was "In Bed with Bird Chirps": it's a look at sunrise and birdsong that I think we've all experienced, but I don't remember reading before. And I liked the beginning, "Another morning / Blues the sky", with its pun on blues.