Poem of the Week

Catching frogs.

By D S Maolalai

the sun reaches down

under earth's deep

moist surface,

grabbing the shoulder

of flowers to pull

upward

with the violence

of clumsy

young children

snatching at frog

under muck.

Biography: D S Maolalai is a graduate of English Literature from Trinity College in Dublin and recently returned there. DS Maolalai has been nominated eight times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, "Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden" (Encircle Press, 2016) and "Sad Havoc Among the Birds" (Turas Press, 2019)

Analysis of “catching frogs” by Dr Pragya Suman

“Catching frogs” is a typical example of concrete Imagist poetry. Here we see the words are fixed in a vertical cascade to invent a concrete image. Two images are juxtaposed and interlinked by the third one. In the first image the sun is reaching the earth and in the third image is children snatching the frogs. Two hard images are fixed with soft sculptures of flowers and it symbolizes the undertow of varied ripples of life.

The Imagist movement was short lived, but it’s vitality has outlived many conjectures and criticism. Here in this poem we see it is reincarnated again. Imagism was a descendant of symbolism. Symbolism used to be in tune of sound while imagism is like sculpture.

In “catching frogs” we see the visual energy is fixed through direct, economical language in a hard outline.