Michael Collier presents several inconsistencies when read. He was a member of a generation active in politics, feminism, and the general fight for their rights. Despite years of prodigious involvement in politics and the social scene, Collier’s poetry expresses a love for the home setting that dates back to his early years. His perspective is reminiscent of sympathetic depictions of outcasts and eccentrics. It remarkably resembles Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Tilbury City Narratives. Collier has engaged as an activist on causes ranging from local school reform to ecology, yet he rarely addresses such urgent modern themes in his poems. Instead, he is more interested in the unforeseen events happening nearby and on the street.
Collier’s recently published poem Tree Beyond Your Window demonstrates all of his artistic talents. The metaphor of existence and metamorphosis is at the poem’s heart and transmitted through a dying leaf and tree. The verse reveals the cycle of reality through the metaphor of a plant’s metamorphosis into an amphibian, not without a sad strangeness in the author’s soul. Despite having a degree in academia, Collier produces simple poetry to listen to. The author explores several topics related to the home and environment in his gently musical works. This stanza takes advantage of the natural intonations and sound collisions that occur in spoken English in a reassuringly spontaneous manner. In Collier’s opinion, such plain language is melodic enough to sustain the deep tones of the poem. More strikingly, this work rejects the sarcastic distance and cynicism that characterizes the conventional academic position. The complexity of Collier’s characters’ feelings, which hover just outside the ordinary realm, is revealed through his sensitive and humanistic eye. This ordinariness is precisely what Tree Beyond Your Window illustrates through the author’s gentle writing style and compositional strategy. These are floaty, fluid ideas that move from thing to thing while towering large in the reader’s soul.
The author creates images simultaneously present in two different historical periods, overlapping with shadows and dreams while maintaining the realism of a specific fall topic. Collier refers to situations in which the sensual and emotional suddenly come to the fore. He paints a picture of a dying tree, leaf, and stick with a sponge and a human hand after simply observing the natural landscape outside his window (Collier). They are shown in various vibrant visuals, producing a dynamic contrast. The poems’ slow-moving melodies feature-rich, long vowels and booming consonants in a skilfully calculated combination of emphasis and syllables. This results in a calm, serene reading appropriate for a poem that sits on the cusp between the present and the past. In the piece, joy and desire coexist with death. While seeing the autumnal sorrow, Collier’s emotions appear to be about to explode, but the peace of consciousness soothes them.
The poem Tree Beyond Your Window is a gift from Collier’s heart; it takes the reader on a little tour into the author’s soul through beautifully crafted poetic lines. Here is a collection of natural, straightforward photographs. The author’s thoughts and soul are what provide amphibian life in a dying tree and magnificence in a dead leaf and tree. Tree Beyond Your Window is the perfect example of a poem written in the present tense, as the author observes the scene beyond the window. The author’s poetry has a gentle sound to match their softness, blending calming and shimmering sounds that subtly establish rhythms via the faint pounding of words. Typically, a stanza flows seamlessly into the next without an abrupt punctuation mark. But as was already said, Tree Beyond Your Window contradicts many of the author’s other works. Without using dictatorship, Collier may produce a symbolic landscape. Collier instills a certain sense of desire and hope in the reader by demonstrating how ordinary situations may transform into symbolic ones with careful study.
Work Cited
Collier, Michael. “Michael Collier: ‘Tree Beyond Your Window.’”The Atlantic, Web.