Word: ariels
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Crossing the Water is a collection of poems written in between her first publication Colossus (1960) and her posthumous collection Ariel (1966). The poems are readable, clean, and expert; they deal with her obsessions. Like Monet's cathedral she insists in reviewing each in all lights, under all conditions: the death of her father, her widowed mother, her husband indistinguishable from her father, her suicides, the accidents, the hospitals. She uses her standard lynch pins sparingly and precisely: poppies, mouths, Jews, Germans, the black boot, reptiles, the small animal, the color red, and fire...
...clinks its abundant ice provided her drinks, clearly there was a tension in her, an almost geographical tension, created by her expatriation. This tension is only one of the ambiguities, the reticences, that stays her newly published collection from the calibre of her late and last poems contained in Ariel...
...other guests or colleagues. It is hard to make a grand entrance if you are the first to arrive. Conversely, lateness can be used as a cover-up for shyness. A bashful latecomer may hope that he will not be noticed, slipping into the room quietly, like a guilty Ariel, and hiding himself in the crowd. There are other advantages as well. Since most parties have dull beginnings, the late arriver can spare himself short eternities of throat-clearing ennui. At occasions that involve speeches, he can also avoid yawning stretches of dull and usually empty rhetoric...
...Prospero, Bernard Holmberg properly dominated the plot's complications. His long soliloquies demonstrated the remarkable range of control-both as written and performed-that Prospero exercises over the other inhabitants of the island. Holmberg was affectionately tender to his daughter Miranda, firmly in command of the fairy Ariel; angrily severe in his orders to Caliban his slave. His Prospero possessed the strength and virility to make the aging character less concerned with his own leave-taking than with ensuring himself that those around him awake to the significance of their destined relationships in the proper spirit of awe and responsibility...
Elin Diamond's sensual Ariel complemented Holmberg's methodical Prospero by igniting in him those sparks of sexual creativity that, as much as much as anything else, trigger dramatic confrontations on the island. Interwoven with corresponding discussions of language's uses as well as interconnecting considerations of freedom and servility, the sexual energy of this production drew parallels among Miranda, her lover Ferdinand, Ariel, and Caliban in their individual comings-to-term with themselves...