Task: Sentiment Analysis
Input (English): Chaotic yet . "All life/ has song..." Stan Rice announces at the start of "Singing Yet," chaotic collection of poems from his prior three releases, plus several new poems. Rice (who sadly passed away at the end of 2002) displayed a flair for evocative imagery, but his poetry is so confusingly random that it's almost impossible to decipher.        The first parts of the book are a tangle of bizarre eroticism (comparing melons to a woman) and odd morbidity ("It is death's/drizzle we write/checks on/when we die/we bounce"). But in the "Some Lamb" section, Rice delved into some deeper, more real turf: the death of his daughter from leukemia. "We stopped beside a hole where she/was put by men who could not see."        With an actual focus, Rice's poetry shifts into aching confusion, describing his daughter's illness, death, and burial, all the emotions that came with it. Unfortunately, Rice's poetry doesn't improve after that, including in the stretch of new material at the end of the book -- while his style mellows out a little, Rice's poems are still surreal and still nonsensical. "The iceplants/turn to the sun/their purple/sadist flowers..."       Dreamlike poetry and strange images are not a problem. But Rice's poetry goes beyond strange and into incomprehensible. "Golden silver copper silk/woe is water shocked by milk/heart attack, assassin cancer/who would think these bones such dancers?" he announced at one point. Okay, whatever. Maybe it's about death. Interpret that as you will. While his poetry can be intriguing and seductive, most of the time it just seems like cool phrases tossed randomly together.        Certainly Rice can't be faulted for his lack of description. He could evoke astoundingly weird, Dali-esque images. The problem is, they seem strung together like beads. Rather than focusing on one and exploring it, he seems just to have tossed them together randomly, assuming that they will see profound despite their lack of connection. "Thunder no more, sky/big sandwich gold & coral" -- it doesn't evoke anything by itself, and it seems completely disconnected from what comes after it.        An overview of Stan Rice's poetry, with a stretch of new material, "Singing Yet" doesn't shed any more light on what went through his head. Nor does it make his random poetry any more appealing.
Output (English): NEG