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We asked two people to write a personal response to a poem without telling them who wrote it. See what you make of the poem before turning to the details  (at the end of the reviews).

We welcome suggestions for poems to be used in the future.

THE AIR PLANT Grand Cayman

This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness,
Inverted octopus with heavenward arms
Thrust parching from a palm-bole hard by the cove—
A bird almost—of almost bird alarms,

Is pulmonary to the wind that jars
Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch.
The lizard’s throat, held bloated for a fly,
Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch.

The needles and hack-saws of cactus bleed
A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk;
But this,—defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood,
Almost no shadow—but the air’s thin talk.

Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!
While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main
By what conjunction do the winds appoint
Its apotheosis, at last—the hurricane!

Chris Considine

This poem is not immediately likeable. Its style seems portentous
and old‑fashioned. ‘Angelic dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!’ Even the capital letters on Dynamo and Blue have an archaic feel, and seem (as the whole poem does) to be claiming some rather forced symbolic significance.
  
   The poem is a kind of meditation on a thing, a plant sprouting
from the trunk of a palm tree, either a different plant which has
rooted itself on the tree, or part of the palm, such as flowering or
fruiting stems.
  
   The poet is astonished by this piece of vegetation, seemingly so
extraneous to the tree. Indeed, it seems unlike vegetation at all. It is
likened to an octopus with ‘arms’ or ‘tentacles’, and to a bird. Like
animal or bird, it breathes, it moves. And unpleasantly: its stems
are ‘horrific in their lurch’ – even lizards perch on it nervously. (The
image of the ballooning throat of the lizard confers some of its own
grotesqueness on to the plant itself).
  
   And yet the ‘air plant’ is ‘defenseless’, unlike the cactus (another
unlovely plant). In some respects it is hardly material. It sheds
‘almost no shadow’ and, as we were told in the first line, ‘thrives on
saline nothingness’.
  
   In fact it seems more closely connected with the wind than with
the vegetable kingdom – and this is obviously the point the poet
is making in the last two lines of the poem, though precisely what
s/he is saying is unclear. (Though ‘its’ in the last line could refer to
the sea, I take it to refer to the plant.) Is it that the ‘conjunction’ of
wind and plant actually brings about the hurricane? (The plant gives
voice to the wind, the wind gets increasingly excited, the result
is a hurricane?) Do the out‑thrust ‘arms’ of the plant suggest the
streaming branches or palm‑fronds of trees in a hurricane? The
hurricane is godlike, the plant (Angelic Dynamo) foreshadows it?
Does the ‘tuft’ actually take flight in the hurricane? Hmm. Questions
not answers.
  
   The vocabulary is literary not colloquial, and there are some
striking phrases and lines: ‘pulmonary to the wind’; ‘the needles
and hack‑saws of cactus bleed / a milk of earth’; ‘the air’s thin talk’;
‘beachward creeps the shark‑swept Spanish Main’. The poet is
obviously intoxicated by words and the poem gets increasingly
excited as it goes along. the humble ‘tuft’ develops before our eyes
from plant to sea‑creature to bird to air to spirit.

William Oxley

This is, basically, a formal poem which moves steadily forward
towards a neat closure. The sort of poem that the American New
Formalists such as Dana Gioia, Timothy Steele, Rachel Hadas and R
S Gwynn were producing in the 1990’s.
 
   What was sometimes grudgingly – following similar theatrical
critical practice – called ‘the well‑made poem’, viz, a sort of studied
verse. The poem, like the form, is animated by a spirit of scientific
accuracy but which allows itself a stanza – the fourth one – of poetic
apostrophes, ‘Angelic dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!’ Both
apostrophes, however, are not simply vague poeticisms – however
they may appear so in isolation – but are, in fact, emphatic
summings up of the drama inherent in the description of the air
plant in the preceding three stanzas. they ‘comment’, as it were, on
the dynamism visible in descriptions like ‘Balloons but warily from
this throbbing perch’ and ‘the needles and hack‑saws of cactus
bleed / A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk’; and on ‘the air’s
thin talk’. And speaking of dynamic effect, drama, the opening line
sets the tone, ‘This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness’, yanking
the reader into the poem forcibly. So that, while the principal
interest of the poem lies in its self‑evidently accurate description,
the clever dramatisation of that description is its true achievement;
and while not a particularly profound poem, it serves as a model of
a contemporary type of traditional poem. Apart from those features
already mentioned, dramatisation and the capacity for memorable
phrasing, there is judicious choice of rhyme and half‑rhyme and
an ear for the subtlest of alliteration, as in the opening line already
quoted, or: ‘The lizard’s throat, held bloated ...’ – the latter which
highlights the benefit of alliteration (‘throat’ / ‘bloat’) without it being
especially noticeable. If the poem has a weakness, it is that of many
non‑lyrical ‘lyrics’. To grasp what I mean by this, compare this poem with an equally accurate, but more memorably musical poem such as Keats’ ‘To Autumn’. Which is to say, it does not really sing. and when a poem does not ‘sing’, your average reader will be moved to ask, why couch it in a form, quatrains, that is meant to sing? Well, I suppose the answer I – and the poet – must now give is that the form has become adapted for the page not the lyre.

(The Air Plant' is by the American poet Hart Crane, who committed suicide by leaping from the deck of the S S Orizaba off the Florida coast in 1932, aged 33.)