A garden ornament gets reviewed, and the reviewer is a bird. That is the whole event of Dave Bonta's "Critic," yet the title turns a backyard scene into a small argument about what criticism is. The hummingbird isn't a sneering expert. It is an investigator that circles, touches, retreats, comes back and touches again. The poem suggests that real criticism begins in close, physical attention to a thing, long before it becomes a judgment.
The object under inspection is a "metal pink / flamingo," a piece of garden kitsch, and Bonta makes it quietly comic by giving it a "single rusty leg." The detail is funny, but it also tells us the flamingo has been out in the weather, slowly rusting into the garden it was only meant to decorate. Against it stands the hummingbird, all motion. The repeated verb in "circles / & touches it, / circles & touches it" mimics the bird's orbiting flight, and the poem's form follows suit. The lines are short, usually three to five syllables, and the enjambment keeps tipping the reader forward. The ampersands add to the effect. They are quicker and more casual than "and," and they suit a bird that "zips / in for a landing."
The line breaks also work like stage directions. When the hummingbird lands "on / the single rusty leg," the word "on" hangs at the end of the line, and the reader hovers briefly before the leg arrives. The poem contains no rhyme and no regular meter, which is right for a scene that has no script. It simply follows what the bird does.
The most interesting moment is the four-word burst of questions: "Amazed? Perplexed? / Combatative? Appalled?" Here the human speaker steps in and tries to read the bird's mind. The words are a catalogue of possible critical reactions, from delight to confusion to hostility to disgust. The question marks admit that the speaker cannot know. The poem has quietly doubled its critics: the bird judges the flamingo, and the speaker judges the bird, projecting emotions onto a creature that gives nothing away. The spelling "Combatative," with its extra syllable, even stretches the line as if the speaker were fumbling for the right word.
Then the poem changes its pace. "The sun sinks behind / the trees & the first / katydids start calling," and the final fourteen lines unspool as one long sentence. Dusk settles over the scene, and the insects' chorus places the metal flamingo inside a living evening. The hummingbird returns in this changed light, perching "sideways / just below the tail," a slightly awkward, almost comic posture that suggests a creature willing to look foolish to get a closer view. A critic who comes back at nightfall is clearly not dismissing the work.
The last image is the poem's best. The bird taps the pink wing "with its diviner's / wand of a bill." Earlier, the bill was merely "all-purpose," a tool for feeding, fighting and probing. Now it becomes a dowsing rod, an instrument for finding something hidden. The metaphor moves the bird from mechanical reaction to something like interpretation, as though the bird were searching the flamingo for water. Judging by the imagery, the pink color may be the bait here, since hummingbirds are drawn to bright flowers, but the poem never says so. It leaves the bird's motive open, and ends mid-gesture, mid-tap, without a verdict.
That refusal to conclude is what makes the poem significant. Plenty of poems about nature treat the natural world as a lesson-giver, but this one lets nature be a puzzled and persistent audience for something artificial. It flatters neither the plastic-bright ornament nor the wild bird. It also gently deflates the grand image of the critic as a distant judge. Bonta's critic touches the thing, goes away, comes back and keeps trying to find what might be inside. The poem asks us to read the way the hummingbird looks: closely, repeatedly and with a bit of wonder, even when the subject is a rusty lawn flamingo.