"Elegy on a Toy Piano" by Dean Young

By happenstance I stumbled across a poem called “Elegy on Toy Piano” and was superficially drawn first and foremost to the promise in the title of a piano. I am familiar with pianos and find my own poetry within them, and my intrigue was sparked. I read the poem, quickly, and was struck—not by the lack of relevance to what I had anticipated but to the depth and beauty in the simple words, crafted beautifully with powerful imagery. I was also struck upon first glance by the resemblance of the poem to my own style. Like my own, the style of the poem is one of clipped descriptions that weave together gradually to develop an idea. Even the syntax and word choice resonated with me because I was familiar with it in my own linguistic mind.

I find I am most attracted to artworks which dance the line between joyous and dark, major and minor, yellow and blue; this poem appealed to me greatly because it, too, weaved itself along this tantalizing line. In own moment, there is a glimmer of hope, and in the very next, melancholy—yet never joy or despair. “The injured gazelle falls behind the  herd. One last wild enjambment.” In this clipped stanza it is shown most clearly, the dance between good and evil. An injured gazelle falls, presumably to his demise, yet his fall is not tragedy by a “last wild enjambment.”

Lastly, the author tinkers with words in a way to make them appealingly bizarre (which, to me, resembles the style of T.S. Eliot). For example, he says, bluntly and unapologetically, “Your head becomes a peach pit.” I do not yet understand the intricacies or even the more basal meanings of this lovely poem, yet I know from the instant tonal and rhetorical appeal that I will love to find out.