Most poems about death want to sound enormous. Dave Bonta's "Review" does the opposite and shrinks the afterlife to a piece of household glass. If the speaker should die, they will "use it / as an ordinary window", and what they expect to see through it is neither heaven nor darkness but boys playing in a back yard on an evening that is merely "pleasant."
The first puzzle is the pronoun. What is "it"? The poem never says, and the grammar points at nothing, so the reader has to fill the gap. The most natural answer is death itself, or whatever lies beyond it. The speaker would treat it as a window rather than a door, so there is no journey to somewhere new, only a view. The title supports this. "Review" can mean an assessment, but split it and you get "re-view," to see again. Death becomes a place to stand while looking back at life.
The surprise is what gets looked back at. There is no wedding, no great love, no deathbed. There is a game in a yard, and then the final couplet turns: "at the beginning of a quarrel." The word "our" in "our back yard" suggests a shared home, so the quarrel might be among the boys, or between the speaker and someone they live with, or both. The poem doesn't decide, and it doesn't need to. What matters is the timing. The memory is held at the moment when pleasantness is about to sour, and the poem stops before we learn what happens next. It is also telling that the yard is "ours" but the boys are only "the boys." The poem claims the place and leaves the relationships unexplained.
The construction is spare. There are six lines in three couplets, no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters except the pronoun "I." Without punctuation the whole poem becomes one sentence that runs across the white space between couplets, like a single unbroken look. The rhythm is that of speech, but the opening line has a faint, formal beat: "if I should die I shall use it." The pairing of "should" and "shall" sounds like a vow, or a clause in a will. That solemnity is then deflated by the flat, domestic phrase "ordinary window." The gap between stately grammar and plain object is both the poem's quiet joke and its tenderness. A word for oaths is being spent on something as unremarkable as a pane of glass.
"Ordinary" is the key word. Most writing about the afterlife wants the extraordinary, but here the speaker wants the opposite, and the plainness of the wish is what moves us. "Use" works in a similar way. It is a practical verb, the kind you would apply to a tool, and it keeps sentiment at arm's length. Even the hypothetical, "if I should die," is offered casually, as though death were an event to plan for rather than fear.
The second couplet begins with "seeing," a participle that attaches loosely to the speaker. Who is doing the seeing, and from where? The grammar lets the act of looking float free of any body, which fits a speaker who is imagining themselves beyond one. The line break after "evening" also does real work. "A pleasant evening" stands complete for a beat before the next line qualifies it, so the reader feels what someone in that yard would feel, contentment followed by the first hint of trouble. Play and quarrel are close neighbours in any group of boys, and the poem lets the two words sit in the same sentence.
The poem is significant because it is so small. It suggests, without arguing the point, that what we might most want to keep from a life is its texture rather than its peaks, and that the texture includes friction. Choosing the start of a quarrel as the thing to watch forever is a strange and generous act, an acceptance that a good evening and its small troubles belong together. Six lines are enough to leave the reader looking at their own back window.