Critical Response To Christina Arganda’s “My Tiny is a daisy, but mighty is her rowr”

I have to applaud Christina, as always, for her use of imagery and metaphor. But in this poem, she is truly showing off her chops in the category of dexterity. The pantoum is a tricky form and it is hard to make images come into their own when being forced to reference previous lines, but Christina has nailed it. My favorite images, “canary diamond silk sheets” and “a hollow cloud withers in her hands and dies”, are both strange but they work within the context of the poem. However, I am forced to say that the title of the poem does not, for me, match up with the overall mood of the poem. The pantoum can quite easily create a mood or a vivid scene, but just one line can make the reader question it.
All of this being said, however, I have to further applaud Christina for her adaptation of the pantoum form into the blank verse form. Though the meter is rough in places, the revised product has the ghost of the pantoum included in the blank verse; technically making it a sort of nonce form which really works for Christina. The only suggestion I can offer for the blank verse version would be to toy with punctuation and possibly break it up into stanzas. While reading it, I was subconsciously adding punctuation (but that may be a problem with the blog, so…). Anyway, both versions were a pleasure to read, but I would just suggest the little tweaks in order to make the poems truly great.