Anne Carson's poem plucks on our heartstrings as she reminds readers of the supernatural way inanimate objects manage to hold the life their owners once occupied. Scents, images, sounds, but most of all, physical items, can be the most wonderful and most difficult reminder of the ones we've lost. Carson transforms the cardigan into words as she struggles to express the pain she endured as her father succumbed to the disorientation of dementia. The deteriorating lines progress from lofty descriptions ("moonbone in the sky") to sharp images ("riding backwards.") In my opinion, the poem loses some of its depth in the fluffy descriptions. I think it would function better if it contained more raw, vivid images and less intrinsic adjectives.
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To me, the strength of the poem lies in the narrative rather than the imagery. The simple act of the speaker putting on the father's old blue cardigan and sitting in the dark gives me a feeling of profound loss and emptiness. There's a striking sensitivity to this poem also, I think, in that the speaker is so acutely perceptive of how dislodged the father was from the world, even as a child "riding backwards" on the train as the haystacks sweeping past the window seem to shock him.
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