Poems of the Decade

Theme: Identity

Form: Villanelle that does not completely follow the form regulations (nineteen lines, tercets, 2 rhymes throughout) imply a not perfect family (split up)

• Like a christian marriage, a couple becomes one flesh, this is conveyed in the narrator's hands "my father's by my fingers, my mother's by my palms"
• Sense of discovery and happy tone
• Enjambment - link family together (unable to seperate in her body and her hands) 
• "friends who quarry for their image by a river" - those who care try to find, the past image of her parents not able to accept the changed and new people they have become. River represents time and illusion, how the friends are reaching back in time to only find illusions of the narrators parents.
• Uses alliteration to convey the bond she has with her parents, how much their parents are "repelled" cannot seperate them completely because of the bond within her.
• Childrens hand rhymes - reminiscing her parents.
• Last stanza is about the future and how she accepts that her parents has seperated but that does not stop her from wanting to create a family of her own, so that she can have children of her own that carry the bond between her and her partner.
• "My body is their marriage register" - she is using herslef to bring together her parents who are in "seperate hemispheres".