Hey, Monkey Butler. Thanks for reading it and your reply.
Yeah, some people have made the "verbose" comment - I tried to make the work as poetically balanced as possible - (I'm a sucker for imagery). But it was also supposed to underpin the concept - my research into early texts, such as ancient persian, and into narrative verse styles were meant, as I said in my reflec statement, to capture a sense of "idiom". (I made sure to avoid tautology though - ever read ancient Persian texts - "I am xerxes, king of kings, king of lands, an aryan, of aryan seed" - majorly redundant hehe).
In reference to the Meso-American names, I suppose I have been working with them for so long, than any sense of awkwardness has long since abated - I wanted to use them dually symbolically and tonally - the evocation of natural imagery, and earlier totemistic association suggesting primal life. The extracts were meant to adress fundamental issues of resonance in philosophy, religion and science.
Its strange, cause I have gotten mixed reviews. Some have loved it (like the librarian at school, after the head of english gave it to her to read cause she was a spec fiction fan, lol), and others have made similar comments to you - that it didn't engage them, etc. It makes me wonder how the makers are gonna take it. Surely they mark it in the context of its conceptual and artistic resolution? If that's true, then I should be ok, I suppose. Ah, only Time will tell.