Brian Doyle-Joyas Voladoras

Of the four pieces of writing we had to read I Joyas Voladoras was the piece I liked the most.  I liked the way the sentences seemed more like statements of facts strung together to form the writers vision.  Sentences like “Each one visits a thousand flowers a day.” Followed by “They can dive at sixty miles an hour.”. In the beginning they all seem like just that statements of fact but as you read on you begin to see where the sentences are leading you too.  Not only that but the author starts each new idea/paragraph in the same way starting with facts statement after fact statement but making all those facts lead the reader down a certain road to a certain conclusion.  I just thought this was a really original way to write.

            Another thing I liked about it was even though the author was writing about animals that the reader made know nothing about the way the author described the animals’ characteristics made up for that.  For example when they are writing about the tragic seeming death of the humming bird they write “…racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs, and violet-capped wood nymphs, crimson, topazes and purple crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst wood stars, rainbow-bearded thorn bills and glittering-bellied star-frontlets…” Even though I didn’t have any idea what these birds should look like just by those short two word descriptions I could picture them in my mind.

            I liked the way they began the essay speaking about animal hearts and built up or ended the essay speaking about the human heart.  That they started with the tragedy of the death and sadness of a humming birds death as the birds heart stops.  Then they finally tied it in with the idea that the human heard is just as fragile and can be broken just as easily. 

~ by moonshine2183 on October 7, 2007.