Does "The Black Sea" by Stephanos Papadopolos fill you with optimism or pessimism?

The poems themselves ebb and flow into iambic pentameter, nimble and sure-footed in their music. The wheat “dwindles like an army”, mouths are “angry drawers sliding shut.” It isn’t only the characters who speak; some of the best poems reflect by juxtapositions. Lost armies of ancient emperors march across the bleak landscape, but so do armies of caterpillars in the spring: “slaves/ to a season without end; it comes again,/ their innards stain the earth with bile/ when their chain is broken by a boot sole/ and the rest inch forward without purpose.”

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