Laurie Sheck, The Willow Grove

just because it looks like poetry, doesn't mean it's poetry

 

I am pretty sure I have said before I do not often buy individual books of verse. Mostly I buy collecteds or selecteds, because they are people important enough I want to get a broad feel for them, or writers I have enjoyed that I want to collect them all, as it is said. (And, as has happened, you find a gem in the collected that you probably would have missed one book at a time.) Truth is I can look through shelves of individual books at the bookstore and not find anything I am at all interested in. For the most part sophistication just ain't there. But, occasionally, I do buy them, carefully and with thought beforehand. Laurie Sheck's The Willow Grove is such a book. It was recommended to me and I took a look online at what can be found of her verse and thought it interesting enough for eight bucks. Greatly, though, the fellow who recommended it previously recommended to me Freda Downie so I was willing to give the benefit. Maybe he was starting a streak.

And the first two verses in the book – "White Noise" (3) and "The Return" (4) – I rather enjoyed. Perhaps a little question on the lines feeling somewhat like broken prose but it was just the first two verses so I would overlook it. Though, in "The Return," there is this:

pressed between the other, similar last names, laid down there in print deep black as the wires that carry one human voice to another.

That simile feels weak, more effort than the simile is worth. Printed text is normally pretty black, so is there a difference being made by comparing it to the wires? (And, actually, as I remember, as those wires aged, they grew more grey; they lightened.) Plus, is "that carry one human voice to another" something that needs to be said? Is it, really, adding anything to the verse?

Then came "The Storeroom" (5), and such as:

And what tense in which the musty dampness holds the ovens like moldy, unrocked cradles, eye-holes, graves, and street-cries skip and flare above our listening, but they are muffled from back here, as if they could not touch us, yet still here?

There's lots of imagination there. Lots of words that look very poetical. But does it stand examination? First off, there is a problem in setting (not wholly evident in the given lines). The site of the verse is a storeroom in a store, a storeroom what shares a wall with what used to be a bakery, shares the wall that holds the ovens. So while the verse occurs in a storeroom, it is concerning itself with ovens in the next store over. That's a problem (or there's the problem that the verse is describing the geography so poorly I am misreading it). The natural question to ask is, how is the "musty dampness" of the ovens in the abandoned bakery being felt within the storeroom? And at a very basic level you have to ask, why is there all this concern, in a poem about two persons isolated in a storeroom, with something that is not even in the store? The verse is stretching way outside its setting to find ideas. Generally not good practice. Particularly when stretching out works exactly against the desired effect of closeted isolation.

Second, there is an issue in meaning-making.

in which the musty dampness holds the ovens / like moldy, unrocked cradles, eye-holes, graves

It offers a list of things to be equated to the ovens – more exactly, to be equated with how the dampness holds the ovens. Note that. For when you at all look hard, when you get to

the musty dampness holds the ovens . . . . like a moldy, unrocked cradle

you have to ask, how does musty dampness hold a cradle, exactly? What am I supposed to get out of this? How does musty dampness hold an eye-hole? It might be a un-commonplace phrase but I have no idea what I am supposed to get out of it. Most likely what Sheck intended was to create a list of nouns to be connected to "ovens," but she messed up the writing. Compare hers to this rewrite:

And what tense in which the musty dampness holds the ovens those moldy, unrocked cradles, those eye-holes, those graves

It is much stronger in that the three nouns are now directly modifying "ovens" instead of being put to work to give body to "holds." The three trailing nouns as re-written not only modify "ovens," it escapes the question of how musky dampness holds an eye-hole. But, it does not escape the question of that the central thought is the musky dampness, so why all this effort on expanding the idea of oven. Which, perhaps, means you don't really escape the musky dampness of eye-holes after all. But, for sure, that "like" simply is a false step and should not be there.

And then there there are the next lines, about "street-cries" that "skip and flare above our listening," Except they are in a storeroom in a store. It is the same error. The point of the verse is the isolating of the main character, sitting on the floor in the corner of a storeroom in a store, and yet it moves to things going on outside the store? "Mufffled," is strained.

and street-cries skip and flare above our listening, but they are muffled from back here, as if they could not touch us, yet still here?

Indeed, both lines are wholly strained. The same question with the ovens is asked here: Why are the street-cries even being brought into the verse? Notice "as if they could not touch us": The initial and quite natural assumption of a reader would be that voices on the street could not touch a person hiding in the corner of a storeroom in the store. And yet, the reader is supposed to read that simile – notice, another simile – as though it is revealing a break from the expected. "Street cries, as if they could not touch us, because, contrary to what you think, they normally could." No, they normally could not. The whole clause is an assertion of something that does not hold, and, truth be told, for the distance does not really belong in the verse at all. Finally comes "yet still here?" To me those three words feel like something come out of the flow of a first draft that should have been lopped off in editing but never was. They simply do not belong. It's three words too many. (Which is actually a error to attend to in writing: pay attention to when you are going farther than you need to. Say what needs to be said, then stop.)

In total, the lines are weak. Very weak. And it is important to note the weakness is ideational, not grammatical. It is a poor control of meaning-making.

Which, reading the book, put the thought in my head of weakness, a thought that carried in my reading from page to page, to "Childhood" (29) and these lines (occurring in another store):

clocks on the walls whose cat-faces hum while their tails slice back and forth with a mad metronomic precision

"Mad" there is another word thrown carelessly in, as it clashes, ideationally, with "precision." But do you see the greater error of the lines? They are saying "the clocks' tails moved with the precision of a clock." When do clocks not have metronomic precision. They are the same mechanism. It is a sloppy, lazy phrase, a mistake that did not solely have the effect for me of marring the verse in which it is found, but of confirming what I had suspected throughout the reading thus far: that the verses were clumsily written, and filled with ideational weakness.

 

I prefer writing posts that teach something. Here, I want to teach about sloppy ideation and substituting pretty "poetic" phrasing for good ideation. Also, about reading: just because it looks like poetry doesn't mean, under closer examination, it really is poetry. And you should be reading everything "under closer examination." Not only so you are not fooled by sham poetry, but also because the really good stuff really pays off when you give it the attention it deserves. I'll continue, from the front, verse by verse. I have a number of examples here, and I am chosing not to explain everything at length by constantly offering and re-offering the lines in question as the argument progresses. It might make the reading easier if I were to write that way, but it would make it much longer. I am afraid I am going tend to the "to the point" in what I present and ask you to jump back and forth. Look at the lines, what I point out, back at the lines, back; hopefully you come to see what is there.

 

So, after "The Storeroom" comes "From The Book of Persephone (I)" (7), the sixth stanza:

I remember nothing, I remember the scattered pages, the mechanisms of sums, the cities accomplished and spoiled, crumbling an re-made. The candor of ruin and gates. In daylight the businesses go on, the bright calculations, the frantic advertisements that masquerade as calm. So little evidence is left of what has vanished. As if when the swan lifts off the liquid stare it is the wind of our words it leaves behind.

For someone who remembers nothing, this person remembers a lot. Is there an implied "Oh, wait!" in the middle of that first line? It is, actually a refrain through the verse, the repeated "I remember nothing. I remember," but it never really works for me. How are we to take constant insistence of "I remember nothing" when the whole verse is what she remembers? It comes off for me like a gimmick whose value is just surface effect, which sometimes merits writing just to see what it's like but really should always be edited out, unless the effect rises beyond surface games, and this time it didn't. I'm not talking about repetition: that is an underused technique in both verse and prose. I am talking about repeating "I remember nothing" when it is obviously not true. It invites that insertion: "I remember nothing. Oh, wait! I remember . . . . ." That's not good.

And is it so surprising that "so little evidence is left" of that "what has vanished"? Isn't that the definition of vanish? there is nothing left behind? And I have no idea what to do with "liquid stare" or how that last sentence ties in at all with the rest of the stanza. "The candor of ruin and gates": it seems like a pretty line. But, unfortunately, that is all it seems like: a pretty line. Something thrown in loosely continuing the general theme but without much real attention to ideation. (Indeed, it seems telling that it is a sentence.) Indeed, the whole stanza is very wobbly, a badly performed and not precisely chosen nor carefully organized list of things about "cities . . . crumbling and remade." There is very little sense of control here. A run-on stanza, to wit.

Notice also how we have to accept as given that "frantic advertisements" "masquerade as calm," even though, if they appeared "frantic" then they would not be, not in the least, masquerading as calm. Kind of gotta be one or the other. Besides, in real life, do advertisements masquerade as calm? "Calm" is generally not what I read from most of what I see on TV. The phrase is an assertion that the reader is supposed to blindly accept at face value without question. This is important, as Sheck does this all the time: asserting something that we are to take as given without thinking.

 

"From The Book of Persephone (II)" (8), first stanza:

What song do the hills sing as they whiten? And the goat that stumbles, falling from the jutting rock? And what of the river still pulsing its wishes through my skin? I remember the beveled hills where I once walked, rock the color of stars, yellow swathes of wild orchids by the roadside, but I don't know how to move toward them.

The problem with the first line is I can't get past the question of how hills whiten; I am not at all sure what that means. If she means snow she should have said snow and clarified the matter, though snow would clash with the orchids coming up four lines later. There is nothing present to separate the hills in the fourth line from the hills in the first, so they should be equated. So I am left in that first line to wonder about a song about something left rather ideationally adrift. And then I can tell you precisely what song the goat sings: it doesn't sing any song, because the goat that falls from the jutting rock is dead. (And very much the image she is intending is cliff faces, which clashes with "hills.") And then the river: it is "pulsing its wishes," as such, it is, in a way, singing a song. So why, then, the question of what song it's singing? Three lines that don't really have anything to do with each other, that sound like pretty, poetic lines, but really fall apart ideationally both alone and combined if you at all give them a moment.

Continuing: "Beveled hills." Not to point out the obvious, but all hills are slanted. That is rather their definition. If they just shot straight up ninety degrees they would not be hills, they would be mesas. And if they were flat, well . . . . . So what "beveled" brings into the description is what beveled means: that they were cut. But is that what she really intends? That the land used to be mesas or flat but someone "beveled" hills? I don't think so. It is a poor choice of words. Rock the color of stars? That doesn't work for me. Rock is a broad thing, stars are pinpoints. So what is she trying to add to the idea of rock by bringing in the idea of stars? And even the gist of the sentence: "hills I once walked . . . but I don't know how to move toward them." Perhaps you take the road that you talked about? "Road" should not be in there for that very reason, not that the idea works at all. She is trying, I think, to get to "move toward" the feeling the hills gave her, but the lines are really poorly executed. Try this instead:

I remember the hills where I once walked, the white rocks, the wild orchids, but I don't know how to reclaim that world.

Simpler, perhaps, but much more effective. The lines Sheck wrote are more of hyer throwing about "poetic" phrases one after the other, in a manner that doesn't pay that much attention to how the ideation melds or is developing, and hoping it adds up to a "poem." With "rocks the color of stars" she intends you to take "white" from stars and nothing else: which demands the question, why then use "stars"? There is nothing particularly special about the color of stars, when it comes to it. Notice she does not say "rocks the color of stars, which might imply rocks scattered about the hills like stars in the sky. But, then, it color would have not been to the point, and she would have said "Rocks scattered like stars." To note, though, it is a little false to say the writer hopes the phrases add up to a "poem"; writing like this assumes the "poetic" phrases are poetry, whether it develops ideationally or not.

 

"Living Color" (10):

The verse opens with a straightforward description of someone first adjusting the color on a tv and then turning up the sound. Then comes (I remove the seemingly arbitrary indenting of lines for convenience, here and continuing forward):

is this what fright is, these pale interchangeable faces is this the body of the world that can be seen but never touched,   the faces floating there, the hands, and all the broken things?

It is entirely assertion. "Fright" appears in the text like the word "suddenly" in a story, where the writer is cuing the reader what to think without the effort of creating the idea. There is nothing in the first lines that at all has to do with the idea of "fright," the action is quite quotidian; but, suddenly, we are to see fright in the images on the tv. (To note also, contructing it as a question generally is a weaker construction.) It is asserted that the faces are "pale" and "interchangeable" (are faces on the tv either?), and it is asserted that tv shows us "the broken things." The ideas are neither earned nor justified by the text, just as "the body of the world that can be seen but never touched" is wholly floating in space, without connection to anything offered. Indeed these ideas are all cast aside as the verse moves on. They are asserted, then they are dropped. Another example of thinking the mere presence of "poetic" phrasing, sense irrelevant, makes for a poem.

 

"Poppies" (12), first line:

Red poppies, you do not open onto treachery or possession.

Did anybody, before that assertion, think they did? That line is it, by the way. Idea completely dropped after the line is offered. The line might work and work really well if the idea generated were built upon and flushed out. But as a single-line-thought, it is but an empty assertion. (Yes, I realize how often I am saying the word assertion.)

 

"Evening walk" (13), third stanza, speaking of birds:

What would the sky be like without them – without the wavy passage of the wrens or the redwinged blackbirds lifting from the field's long grass? I think I would fear its emptiness, its deep untamed forgetfulness, the faintest hush of a tamped candle.

Now, I don't like "I think" there because, generally, you avoid the iffy in writing: no "I thinks," no "it seems." It either is or it isn't. Pick one and go with it. In the verse "In the City of Gold Domes" there is "leaving only this soft confusion in which the city drifts and doesn't drift." It looks poetic but it's really bad writing. One or the other. Use both and it's just nickel FX. There is also an interesting question is whether "the field's" is correct. The lines are speaking about "the sky": a generality, and that general thought is continued with the wavy passage of "wrens," but all of a sudden then, there is "the" specific field. It feels like an error because it is an error.

Back to the lines above, there is no first person in the verse until that "I think" and it feels like a break in the voice in the verse. (Again, "think" there is weak writing. Either yes or no. Pick.) Then, do the last two lines even work? "I would fear its emptiness." Most of the time when you look up into the sky it is a vast, empty field, so that does not really work, does it. And now that I think about it, how often, really, does the sky look "empty"? There tends to be clouds populating it more often than not. In the end, it is another assertion. Also, it seems Sheck is a little confusing the ideas of "sky" and "air." Air without birds can look empty. The sky, not so much. (Look up the definition of sky.) The idea of "emptiness" does not really work with sky. Now, I like the phrase "deep untamed forgetfulness," except does it at all apply to the sky? Notice, if the sky had forgetfulness, as written in the verse, that forgetfulness would be a constant presence, not dependent on the absence of birds. Besides, does it at all feel natural to call the sky forgetful? or is that yet another "poetic" assertion? What is the "deep untamed forgetfulness" of the sky? If it is so obvious it can be asserted like that I would think I would have noticed it by now.

Also, the last line is a construction issue. If you read "emptiness," "forgetfulness," and "hush" as a list, then

I think I would fear . . . the faintest hush of a tamped candle.

is problematic. But what if

I think I would fear its emptiness, its forgetfulness, the faintest hush

as though "faintest hush" is to be coupled with emptiness and forgetfulness (as "eye-holes" was connected to "ovens"). A little better construction, but still a problem because there are two items being coupled to the hush. It might work if there were only one, equating, say, emptiness to the hush:

I think I would fear its emptiness, the faintest hush of a tamped candle.

Except it really doesn't escape how we are supposed to see emptiness in the hush. Notice, it's not what might be naturally seen as empty: a candle wick that once was lit but now is not could be seen as empty. That idea could work. But the lines as written are not about the candle, they are about the "hush," about the emptiness of the noise. Except a "hush" is a presence, a presence brought attention to with "faintest"; it's not an emptiness, is it.

Finally, just to note, you can try to connect "tamped candle" with something like birds suddenly vanishing, though that is not in the verse. And it does not cure the poor construction of the last two lines.

 

"From The Book of Persephone (III)" (14), second stanza:

I have heard my voice played back from the tape recorder scorched with distance, as if I did not own it, and the voices of others cut into segments, soundbits like paperclips holding the blown pages. I have known myself as the dizziness marring the still sky, causing it to tilt and quiver, dividing it into wide panels of gray light that fall and break apart. Blame is a secret terror.

"I have heard my voice played back . . . as if I did not own it." To which I say, So what? What is the result of that? What is the effect of that? What am I as a reader supposed to do with that except to go, "oh, that's poetic sounding"? The verse doesn't do anything with it.

Next, "The voices of others cut into segments [] like paperclips holding the blown pages." (Sheck does a lot of similes. They quickly start to become, I would say too noticeable.) First, shouldn't it be the other way around: "like blown pages held by paperclips"? After all, how are paperclips to be equated with segments? It is much more natural to say the pages on a line, held by paperclips, are the segments. Also, by saying "like paperclips holding the blown pages" you are equating the segments not just to paperclips but paperclips "holding." This is a sloppily written line; a line in error created by sloppy writing.

"I have known myself as the dizziness / marring the still sky" – note that the semantics implies that we know what the dizziness that mars the still sky is. Never mind how a still sky is dizzy, when dizziness inherently implies motion either internal, external, or both. It sounds like a nice poetic phrase but try to come up with a reading for it. Indeed, try to make sense of the whole of the sentence: "dividing into wide panels of gray light / that fall and break apart" as if we know what that means, as if it actually means anything. And that last line is wholly from another piece of paper stapled on to the first at the butt. I have no idea how it connects to the stanza at all, how it at all relates to the verse.

I argue these lines are yet more of the same. "Poetic" phrasing that we are to accept as "poetry," even though it does not at all develop ideationally – or, even, make sense ideationally. Indeed, so often in the verses, the phrases clash ideationally, sometimes externally, sometimes internally. This seems to be a "poetry" you are not meant to think about; not closely, at least.

 

Let me add a word here: It is unconvincing poetry. I do not believe – or at least, the verses to not give me the confidence – that Sheck exercised much control over what she was writing, or did not bother with control, or was unable to exert control. This is what the verses tell me.

 

I think you've gotten the idea from me moving one to the next how every verse is plagued with ideational issues, so let's jump ahead to a humdinger as bad as the cat clocks. "From the Book of Persephone (VII)" (39):

and then the pages filled to the margins with print and illustrations

Hopefully you see right off what the problem is: It is impossible for a page not to be "filled to the margins with print and illustrations," because it is the print and illustrations that define what the margins are. Have text that leaves but a quarter inch white space around the edge and the page and it is "filled to the margins"; have but a picture the size of a postage stamp and the page is still "filled to the margins." This is an incredibly lazy phrase that should have been caught immediately if ever happened at all, and is but another of the more glaring examples that make me question whether Sheck is in this book writing verses or just stringing together pretty phrases, loosely – and only loosely – guided by each verse's context. (It is made worse in the "Book of Persephone" verses, which are rather abstract, and thus should demand even tighter control, not looser.)

Something else also to the point. There's a lot of repetition of ideas between the verses. A lot of children. A lot of fists clenching air. An interesting one, perhaps exemplary, is that between "From The Book of Persephone (I)" (7):

The water murmuring was, was, was.

and "Voltage" (16):

Planes pass and pass [. . .] This is, they seem to say, this is

She's repeting her rifs. And they are not used terribly cleverly, really. Just rifs in the verses. And while reading the book I was struck with the idea that it would be interesting to have, in a book, phrases that repeat here and there. But, for it to work to interesting ends – to poetic ends – they would have to be used differently every time, or used in ways that with every utterance that phrase became more and more vibrant. But here, Sheck's verse doesn't generate vibrancy even within the verse. Just sparkling lights. It's like bad jazz that is one riff after the other but only the vaguest sense of making a song. So the repetitions are nothing but that, repetitions.

 

"The Inn" (18), opening stanza:

The air darkens in gradations like a Xeroxed page the machine is making darker with each copy, slowly, slowly, until the inner workings grind finally to a halt, completely broken.

Perhaps an interesting start to a bit (though note no attention to the idea of a poetic line). Except I've never had that happen to me that I can remember, and I would not expect that printed pages would get darker and darker as the machine breaks, at least not breaks in a mechanical way as is implied. So it does not work for me on the experiential level; it is for me another assertion that I just have to accept.

But even more, the idea is totally dropped as soon as the stanza ends. Indeed, the last stanza of the verse – the end of the verse, and the first stanza is about an end – that last stanza begins

The book drops from A.'s hand. She is dozing. Outside the window of the inn a field lies fallow for planting, and beyond that a hill where earlier some cows were grazing.

Perhaps an end in that A. falls asleep, but in no way any notion of something broken. The exact opposite, actually. Indeed, read the whole of the verse and it is obvious the first stanza ideationally has no place and should but cut. And yet, there it is. Is it there solely because it is "poetical" sounding?

 

"From The Book of Persephone (IV)" (20), opening stanza:

The river is quiet now, and dark, as if inside it another world were sleeping, a world a child might dream in which the stars are not constained within their farness but bend to touch the child's skin, its face moth-gray in the hours before morning.

Look at how far away the stanza is at its last words from the idea of river in its first words. Another run on stanza that flows nicely but what about ideation? Keep in mind, "in which the stars are not constrained within their farness" is supposed to be adding description to the river. And, it is adding it indirectly, as it is not the world within the river, but a world "a child might dream." Like I said, sounds nice, but wanders very far afield. Another example of a run-on stanza? (Might make for an interesting writing game: everyone starts with the same phrase, and you see just how far away you can drift without looping. I should write that down.)

 

"From The Book of Persephone (V)" (22); the stanza concerns a room full of clay statues, each one "a mother and her infant child"; the verse describes them:

Each woman's arms looked casual, relaxed, as she held the tiny child in her lap, and yet there seemed in the stiff fingers a hidden desperation.

First, notice the sloppy clash: the arms "looked casual", and yet the fingers are stiff. It's already established what the fingers look like by implication of their inclusion in "arms," particularly in that "casual" modifies how the child is held, which implies also casual hands and fingers. Important here is to see that she does not say:

Each woman's arms looked casual and yet the fingers seemed stiff

she says

and yet there seemed in the stiff fingers

As written, it is an overt clash of thoughts. Sloppy writing probably created because Sheck wanted to say "in the stiff fingers a hidden desperation" and went for it even though the lines already establish the opposite. Plus, looking back at the sentence, is this an example of the error of telling rather than showing? Indeed, though I don't much care for that phrase, telling is asserting. Showing is developing. Those last two lines are asserted. Note that when you are establishing an idea the first instance of it is always asserted, but then you develop the idea, and you develop how the idea works with what is going on around it – you weave your tapestry. Sheck does not do that. She out of the blue says something that is unestablished, and then, pretty much, lets it fall. They never escape being blunt assertions.

 

Anyway. You get the idea. I can continue to go on from verse to verse. I have a note for every one up until I stopped taking notes. So I'll stop and declare enough said.

What to get from this.

(1) "Unconvincing" is a good word to contemplate with writing. Does the verse convince the reader of the text's integrity, strength, inner development. Does the verse convince you that the writer had a solid grasp on technique? on semantics? on meaning-making? Or does it start to feel that words are simply being cast on the page one after the other without idea of the final whole, only worried about each phrase? (Note that formality does not make a verse convincing.) When Sheck writes in "Headlights" (57)

and the flames from the refineries burning at all hours like the flame on the assassinated President's grave

are we really to search for how refineries are like an assassinated president's grave? or do we lose confidence that she was at all paying attention to the whole and just threw in a simile that looked "poetic"? "Unconvincing": It's a good idea to think about. Do I find the verse in The Willow Grove convincing? Not at all. Once you see the more glaring ideational issues, the whole of her verse starts to look like poorly assembled, pretty phrases. The whole of it does not create in me the confidence that Sheck can control an idea through the stanzas of the verse. Indeed, at times I question her ability to control syntax. At least so it was, apparently, during the writing of this book.

"Convincing" verse. Give that a thought, what "convincing" verse feels like and looks like.

(2) Ideation is important, if not essential. Coleridge points out that generally readers only read in small segments, they don't read across lines or across phrases. As I said in the last post, good readers reads across lines, through the whole of the sentence, the whole of the stanza, the whole of the verse. A good reader notices when stanza 6 contradicts stanza 2. A good reader notices when the verse has gotten to stanza 4 and it still doesn't seem to be out of first gear. Verses like the verse in The Willow Grove only work if you are reading in very short segments, where you see "yet there seemed in the stiff fingers a hidden desperation" and go "what a nice, poetic line" . . . . . and not see that it clashes ideationally with the first part of the sentence about the arms.

Control is everything. Grammar and syntax need not be precise, but they need to demonstrate control, that it works according to the abilities of the English language, and that what is on the page is what you intended to write. Semantics can be fluid and creative, but, still, it must demonstrate control to be convincing, to not fall apart, to not create clashes where it is supposed to be creating complex ideas, complexes of ideas. When it comes to it, controlled simplicity is better than out of control complexity. (And when it's out of control, it's not really complexity, is it.)

Control is everything because (again from the previous post) of that all important idea: Composition Is Everything. In writing verse you are making something out of words. You want to the reader to see – and experience – surety in your making, see your skill, see what you made. See that you made and made well. You want to get good enough at building birdhouses that the straight lines look like straight lines, that the right angles look like right angles, that all the pieces fit together as snugly as designed, that a bird would poke their head out the hole and say, "Damn straight I live here."