Poetry Blog #5

TWIST-- Snapping Beans by Lisa Parker
Tone-The speaker's tone in this poem is conversational, yet wistful and restrained. The speaker knows that her and her grandmother aren't as close as they were before she left for college, so she longs to share everything with her grandmother, but can't in order to preserve the closeness between her and her grandmother.
Word Choice-A lot of alliteration is present-"snapped beans into the silver bowl that sat on the splintering glass" and "the sun rose, pushing its pink spikes"- and many controversial words, if you will, such as "Jesus" and "faith" versus "noserings", "sex", "alcoholism", and "Buddha" in order to create an essence of conflict between the grandmother's understanding of the world and the speaker's new experience in the world.
Imagery-The speaker uses imagery to describe the scenery of the poem, the way how her grandmother's hands hold her "face the way she [holds] tomatoes under the spigot",  and to describe the way how the leaf blows onto the porchfront, resulting in the grandmother stating "It's funny how things blow loose like that". The imagery throughout this poem is essential in helping the reader picture what the speaker is conveying in her conversation with her grandmother. Also, not barely any dialogue is used in this poem, and the imagery fills in nicely for that.
Style/Syntax- As mentioned before, alliteration is prominent throughout the poem, along with simile ("as real as any shout of faith and potent as a swig of strychnine) and personification ("familiar heartsick panels of the quilt she made for me"). These devices help to arrange the poem in its wistful nature, with the speaker basically using comparisons to express the distance between her world and her grandmother's worlds.The imagery that the speaker uses takes the place of any dialogue that could be going on, which is another aspect of the style of the poem.
Theme- Colliding the two different worlds of religion and secularism would not result in a positive outcome, but avoiding it could create an even greater and more unfortunate disconnect between the people whose lives are influenced by these worlds.

This poem relates to me in the fact that it is similar to the relationship that I have with my grandmother. Whenever I go to visit her, we always spend time making food together with activities such as snapping beans just like the speaker and her grandmother do. My grandma is also very religious, and "What A Friend We Have In Jesus" is an example of one of the many church hymns that my grandma would hum or sing while we spending time together. I am also religious myself, so I share a lot of the same views with my grandmother, although I do live in a different world than her in what I experience every day at school and work. Me and my grandmother aren't joined at the hip, but we still have closeness between us, and trying to introduce the world that I experience every day with her might upset her due to our beliefs (heck, what I experience upsets me alone).