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I agree with this - 'clever' isn't the word I would use. And the 'absence' was what I felt and also the sense of leftovers - hence, in my mind, the stew and/or soup - and the hint of borrowed time and borrowed space. Is it about loss of faith? Cheers, Jill on 18/10/00 8:05 AM, [log in to unmask] at [log in to unmask] wrote: > 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 > > > > > > > > %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%