Recently, I said I wanted to get myself a collection of poems by Floyd Skloot. Then I ordered three of his books (two collections of poems and a memoir). This is from his Selected Poems: 1970-2005 (Tupelo Press, 2007):

MY DAUGHTER CONSIDERS HER BODY

She examines her hand, fingers spread wide.
Seated, she bends over her crossed legs
to search for specks or scars and cannot hide
her awe when any mark is found. She begs
me to look, twisting before her mirror,
at some tiny bruise on her hucklebone.
Barely awake, she studies creases her
arm developed as she slept. She has grown
entranced with blemish, begun to know
her body's facility for being
flawed. She does not trust its will to grow
whole again, but may learn that too, freeing
herself to accept the body's deep thirst
for risk. Learning to touch her wounds comes first.

Two things struck me about this poem. First, it reminded me of my daughter Luisa. And when I showed it to my wife she just now, she said, "That's Luisa."

Secondly, only after I read and enjoyed the poem did I notice that it is a sonnet. According to some understandings of how rhyme and meter should work, that makes this an excellent sonnet: the claim is that one should not notice rhyme and meter while reading a rhymed, metrical poem; one should not notice the artifice. So my not noticing that this is a sonnet until I looked at it a second time would be great praise.

Now I do think this is a wonderful poem, and in particular a wonderful sonnet. But why is the idea so prevalent that one should not notice a poem's artifice?

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I wondered about posting Skloot's poem without asking him for permission, but the poem was already online (here, among other places), so I figured it would not be a problem to quote it in full again.