Dizzy in Your Eyes: Poems about Love by Pat Mora

Image retrieved from www.amazon.com

Bibliography:

Mora, Pat. Dizzy in Your Eyes: Poems about Love. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. ISBN 9780375843754

Review and Critical Analysis:

Dizzy in Your Eyes by Pat Mora is a collection of 50 poems about love written in the voice of teenagers. Mora introduces the collection with a letter to readers. In it, she explains that she wrote these poems with the intention of showing the intensity of the teen years - that time in our lives when emotions are turned up, “and some days we look at someone and feel dizzy in their eyes.” With the kind of intensity that comes with teens and love, Mora has chosen the perfect subject to capture her audience’s attention.

         Although Pat Mora originally intended to write the poems in this collection in free verse, she took her editor’s suggestion and included many other poetic forms. The collection includes poems written in free verse, tercet, list, acrostic, sonnet, haiku, acrostic, and more. To introduce each new form of poetry to readers, Mora includes its name and definition on the page adjacent to the poem written in the form. Readers will already be familiar with some of them, such as acrostic or sonnet, but many of the poetic forms will be new, such as cinquain and triolet. Mora’s inclusion of these different forms of poetry and their definitions will inspire readers to discover more types of poetry and even write poetry themselves using these forms.

         The poems in this collection are not in a random order. In the letter to readers, Mora explains that as she was deciding the order of the book, she thought of the book as a piece of music. This piece of music has four movements, so the poems in the book are divided into four movements. It moves from love’s initial rush, to love’s heartaches, to love’s healing, and then to falling in love again. Many of the poems include Spanish words or translations, keeping them true to Mora’s Spanish heritage and style, and making them appealing to the latino teen audience.

         Dizzy in Your Eyes is a quick read, but it has the ability to meet teen readers right where they are in the midst of love’s intensity, or to take adult readers back to the time and place when they first experienced love’s intensity. It will allow readers to relive their first heartbreak, like in the poem “The Silence” when a girl asks her childhood friend to the prom, but he invited someone else. Then it will remind readers how it felt to love again, like “Love Haiku” where the teen writer says, “Everything’s in love. / Birds, butterflies, and now me, / dizzy in your eye.” This collection of poetry truly captures the essence of love and the feeling that “No one has felt like this. Ever.”

Poem Used to Support Critical Analysis:

Four-Letter Word

Like breathing, I started when I was born,

    started loving. I didn’t know its name,

    but I knew pleasures: eating, warmth.

One day, like a flash of lightning, I linked

    the four letters, the feeling, with the word.

    The word was never the same.

Very soon, I could list loves galore:

    sunshine, Mom’s smile, Dad’s laugh, our house,

    my bed, jeans, friends; the taste of peppermint,

    music that lifted me soaring off the floor.

Ever since I met you, the word, the same four letters

    became a private place

    your face takes me,

    ours the only keys

    to the invisible door.

Pat Mora’s use of a variety of poetic forms in this collection of poetry makes it an excellent resource for teaching poetry in the young adult classroom. Teens love “love poetry,” so the poems would be appealing and interesting to students simply because of that. Mora’s writing is inviting for teens, so it would go well to use this book to teach poetry to young adults.

During a poetry unit, as each form is taught, I would choose a different poem from the book that is written in that form. We would read the poem together (along with many others written in that form) and students would write a poem of their own using that form. I would share Mora’s poem, “Four-Letter Word,” in the same way. During our focus on acrostic poems, I would introduce this poem. Students would then choose a subject for their own acrostic poems. After peer-revision, students would create and illustrate a final product to share with the class and put on display in the classroom.