Critical Analysis Of 'The Branches, The Axe'

The title of this chapbook and the first section of the poem, which I believe would be called a strophe, connects the word “missing” with the sense of loss. Yet, there is a specific theme that occurs throughout The Branches, the Axe, the Missing and that would be personal loss and the gain of mankind since the beginning of time. The poet takes on two different types of narratives throughout her book. She is looking at the main patriarchal figures in her life; her father and her ex-husband. The opening lines give direction to her feelings of loss as she refers to “the got-away” as a metaphor of how she views the lost relationship. She walks her readers through her feelings by describing her feelings “her last act as a married woman” and also

To protect herself she reminds her ex-husband “that she had never been in love” and told her father “that he would drag her down” and then they were “gone.” Walking away from a mentally ill father who abused her is a specific emotional release yet she says “there is a loss in this / success that she does not understand”, which shows her confusion in the contradiction of her feelings. Pence goes uses the metaphor of the branches of a tree to describe the conflict she feels internally. She writes of a tree that she sat under with her father, which is now wrapped with poison ivy. She tries to kill the poison ivy, but it is a futile battle and so she succumbs to the reality that life if filled with

The prose is a narrative that allows the reader to maintain interest and the idea of lyrical poetry is delegated to the maintained attention of an empathetic attachment to her story. She writes of despair in relationships and attributes the gain/loss to the early days of the relationship between humanity and fire. Charlotte Pence closes her chapbook the same way she opened it reflecting on fire. Specifically, the origins of the relationship between man and fire and how it speaks to the relationships we all have with each other. Relationships are about the gain of love and the loss of love. She walked the reader through her gain and loss between the fire. The tone of her prose was pessimistic throughout most of the book, yet in the end when she speaks, “the darkness quiets if we watch it together” a sense of hope negates her pessimism. The ability to follow her path throughout the chapbook also lead the way to a self-reflection regarding the connection of present to the