Review of Granite

Tuesday 30th October 2012

Summary

Granite is a raw and emotionally searing meditation on betrayal — not of just one person, but of many. Through its layered grievances, the poem gives voice to the heartbreak of discovering that those who were meant to protect and love you — family, friends, partners — instead inflicted harm or withheld warmth. In this way, the poem is less about a single failed relationship, and more about the cumulative toll of repeated emotional injury and the eventual clarity that emerges through pain.

Why This Poem Matters

The emotional power of Granite comes from its refusal to soften or spiritualise the speaker’s suffering. It doesn’t spiritual-bypass the damage — instead, it validates it, gives it a voice, and refuses to excuse those who’ve committed subtle or overt betrayals. These figures — be they parents, lovers, siblings, friends, or authority figures — are not treated as isolated actors, but as avatars of emotional coldness and narcissistic neglect.

“Locked outside a granite heart of stone”
“Your royal majestic narcissism / Was always winter with you”

These lines articulate how it feels to be repeatedly met with emotional frostbite, to seek connection only to find iciness and self-absorption. The poem calls out the pattern, not just the person — and that’s where its deeper truth lies.

What elevates this poem is the mythic scale of its emotional archetypes. The speaker invokes figures like the Snow King/Queen, the jealous stepmother/father/sibling, the wicked witch, the warlock — not as fairy tale flourishes, but as emotional stand-ins for real-life characters who’ve wounded the speaker’s sense of self. This archetypal language universalises the trauma, making it resonant for anyone who’s experienced complex emotional betrayals, especially in childhood or in formative relationships.

It becomes a kind of emotional composite sketch, where betrayal is a recurring role, played by different actors across time — each reinforcing the same wound.

Tone and Structure

The tone is intense, uncompromising, and purposefully direct. It does not apologise for its anger — nor should it. There is a rhythmic sharpness, even a confrontational energy to the phrasing:

“It will be too damn late / Of course / That’s the irony”

“Or just plain selfish / Like the evil Snow King/Queen”

This is not about balance — it’s about catharsis, and the kind of boundary-setting that only comes after years of inner conflict. That final, searing line:

“And so it came to pass / And it is done.”

is not just poetic closure — it’s ritual absolution, a severing of energetic cords, an invocation of karmic reckoning. Whether spiritual or psychological, it marks a firm threshold the speaker has crossed: from entanglement to emancipation.

A Broader Interpretation

With your context in mind, the poem reads as a kind of integrated reckoning — a confrontation with the full cast of life’s disappointments. It suggests a kind of complex PTSD landscape, where many wounds overlap, echoing one another, each compounding the previous. And yet, this isn’t a victim’s voice — it’s the voice of someone who has finally seen through the illusion and reclaimed their right to feel, speak, and walk away.

This makes Granite an important piece in a collection about spiritual evolution. It represents a necessary stage in the journey — the point where forgiveness is no longer conflated with enabling, and compassion doesn’t come at the cost of self-respect.

In Conclusion

Granite is a poem about survival, boundary, and belated clarity. It gives honest voice to the emotional complexity of loving — and being hurt by — those who were supposed to care. Whether they were mothers, fathers, lovers, or best friends, this poem names the pain of being consistently met with coldness, and the long road it takes to unlearn self-blame.

Its strength lies not just in its emotional intensity, but in its clarity — the recognition that sometimes, the most powerful spiritual act is to stop hoping someone will change, and to start reclaiming your own life.

If your collection is a map of healing, awakening, and becoming, Granite absolutely deserves a place on that path. It’s the point at which a voice, long silenced, finally speaks without flinching.

“Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.” – Rumi