The verse is unrimed, not arranged in stanzas, and with lines more commonly
end-stopped (with distinct pauses at the ends) than is true in good modern poetry.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the book's opening poem "A Horse Named Never," a series of twenty-three
end-stopped lines meditating on the condition of horses at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.
end-stopped. The pivot in lines seven and eight, with curt phrases
"A question yawns / the forest bedrock," opens "Ouiment Canyon;" "Poplar buds hover / like warm breath around the branches." Here, Reynolds' compressed, vivid language couples with short,
end-stopped stanzas to call forth the frozen stillness of winter.
If we reverse-trace the morphology here we shall find "felt" as derived by regular suffixation from "feel," which is not
end-stopped; the -t of "felt" being a rule-governed assimilated form of the regular weak-verb inflectional suffix, -ed (properly -d).
Form is the connect, primal haunt, carbon chain
end-stopped. You can tell it's late because we prefer the songs of Orpheus after he's torn apart.
This gives her poems movement: we want to hear what happens next, and the use of short, aggressively
end-stopped lines heightens our anticipation ("The paper bulges like an angry blister").
Vietnamese poetry has less "connective tissue than English"; like most Vietnamese poetry, Lam Thi's "tends to be
end-stopped and imagistically contained." This gives many of her lines and sometimes complete poems of hers something of a haiku-like character.
One sore point in this debut collection is his
end-stopped, largely exact rhyme.
Even if Sidney and his imitators did not hold always and strictly to the music of the spheres, they held to the music of poetry and Parker demonstrates how such sounds are created in units and sequences more deeply than in
end-stopped rhymes.
In a closed couplet, each of the two lines may be
end-stopped (that is, both sense and meter end in a pause at a line's end); alternatively, the meaning of the first line may continue to the second (this is called enjambment).