Last Act

• Written in free verse
• "Don't be surprised it has taken so long / to show you these"


  Iambic metre slows the pace of the poem which is ordered to begin with
• "the gaps like missing teeth / in the face of my speech,"


  Extended simile shows youth as a continuous change, life is transitory

  Reminds the reader of a stutter, difficulty in articulation, Sheers had a stutter
• "the silent mouthing O,"


  metaphor, theatrical presentation yet also a nothing

  Shakespeare reference
• "the stuck record of my tongue / and the countdown through the page"


  Enjambement causes the pace to speed up. Links to how time takes over you, you have no control over it, events speed up and then you're at the final act and you can't do anything about it.

  A countdown to death
• "Because/ isn't this always the last act?"


  Volta and rhetorical question make the reader reflect, no matter what you do in life all life ends in death
• "the actor, bowing as himself / for the first time all night."


  Sheers wants the readers to accept and be honest with themselves and who they truly are. He is warning his readers of waiting till death to accept themselves.
• This poem is found before the collection starts which highlights the cyclical nature of the collection, the end is at the start.
• 'Last Act' is an introductory poem.
• The choice to use 'Last Act' as an introductory poem could be viewed as the ending of a process, a relationship, with the other poems a retracing of the "previous scenes stacked in the wings"
• The poem could also be seen as a final performance (either social or dramatic) before the honesty of the other poems where he fills in the 'gaps like missing teeth' suggesting a healing process.
• In the poem Sheers has adopted an informal register and used free verse which offers him freedom of linguistic expression, lineage, form and metre.
• The use of free verse adds a personal tone to the poem which is also evident in the confessional intimacy he offers through the oral imagery "gaps in my teeth", "silent mouthing O" which will become a motif in the collection.
• The opening line of the poem is decasyllabic and is broken uncomfortably by the hyposyllabic "to show you these" which helps to create the confessional, euphemistic tone of the poem.
• The use of both hypersyllabic and hyposyllabic lines signals a movement from the lengthier lines of performance to the shorter lines of reality which suggests that the collection is going to be about that movement to honesty and reality.
• Many of the images in the poem such as the "silent mouthing O" and the "zero of the word failing to catch" there is a lack of something, something's needed which may be viewed in a phallic or yonic sense. It is only the "spotlight" itself where the circle is filled by the revelation of the actor, both a completed absence and a framing device.
• The motif of theatre is interesting: poetry and acting are both performative media, though the former is often treated as thinly veiled autobiography and the other as authorial ventriloquism. In this poem, by "drawing back" the curtain to "show the parts we've played", Sheers is effectively breaking the fourth wall in a theatre by emphasising the conscious construction of the art form through which he's expressing himself. This is ironic as he's exposing himself through a carefully created poetic voice.
• Speech and language is a motif in the collection, in 'Last Act' they are seen to be absent in the "silent mothing O" and the "record" which is "stuck" and a "zero" which is "failing to catch". The inability to connect, which is especially evident in the final image, suggests that Sheers as a constructed voice is offering the poems in the collection as an intensely personal record of an unseen past.