The City Planners- Margaret Atwood

 STANZA 1:

'Cruising' - Satire/ irony/ mocking tone 

'What offends us' - outsider's disapproval. Personal resentment and attack on the sterile suburban uniformity

'Pedantic rows' - perfect or at least striving for perfection

'planted sanitary trees' - control everything even natural must be uniform and perfect

'No shouting here'- usually negative but here the absence of shouting is negative

'Rational whine' - oxymoron. Only noise allowed is a mower which is improving perfection

'Discouraged grass'- natural is suppressed

STANZA 2:

'Driveways neatly sidestep hysteria' - personification

'hysteria- obsessively tidy

'Display...sky' - pararhyme makes description haunting

'The smell of split oil a faint sickness' - describes mistakes hiding under a facade of perfection

'Lingering in the garages' - small imperfections

'as a…