Cadnice wrote:
>"Holy Thursday" doesn't seem to me to have that sort of quality at
>all, though, with its muted, vaguely "kindly" air of languor--a
>downstyle that deploys simplicity as seasoning and gives this poem
>(stew, soup) an unexpectedly rich, robust broth: a very clever poem
>indeed (as Peter Howard has already noted).
Cleverness doesn't leap to my mind neither, as the first adjective the
describe that poem. Though I like how the whole things hauls up to
"absence", arriving there with a kind of shock which reverberates back
through the whole poem. That _is_ clever, but not merely clever: it
seems driven by an emotional morphology.
It occurs to me that one of the cleverest books I've read is Nabokov's
Lolita. But all its literary tricks hardly seem the point of it. I too
like acrobatics, but if the circus just grinds on and on demonstrating
its virtuosities, its marvellousness begins to be banal.
Best
Alison
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