Word: bravuraed
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...potato fields, a jumble of sun-flushed legs on the sand. With a handful of minor exceptions, De Kooning's paint work manages to avoid the rather flaccid, glutinous and mushy quality it assumed in the middle '60s; his gestures occupy a curious middle ground between bravura swipe and pastelly softness, and the pigment oozes suggestively, a matrix of wavering depths. The sum effect is of sensual chaos, but modified with knowing flicks and placements: sprawl as form, luscious and-despite all the turbulence on top -lazily seductive. They are among the most accessible canvases De Kooning...
Neither the neighbor nor the chickens were very good critics. For Ponti, at 34, is one of the most striking-if somewhat controversial-keyboard talents to appear on the concert stage in years. With a flair for the old-fashioned bravura style and a staggering technique to put it across, he is a one-man tidal wave of sound. His hands can hammer out octaves with machine-gun speed and force. He can pounce on flawless trills from a three-foot distance. He can zip off glissandi in octaves and double notes that would tear the fingernails of many pianists...
...spirit palls and the resolute good humor stretches thin. Drunk once more, you stumble home alone to wrest yourself to sleep in an unmade, comfortless bed. And the party's almost over and whadaya got to show? The one-liners have long since faded. And after one or two bravura letters, the friendships fade as well. So what then's left to do short of shuffling through Senior Yearbook for the next 2000 years? Let's face it. College is pretty much a shuck. A holding action with a seductive glow that hasn't even the half-life...
Occasionally the earlier, more resilient Berryman still surfaces. There is a wonderful bravura hymn to Beethoven; a hymn to a Minnesota Thanksgiving feast that ends with a hearty "Yippee"; bouquets tossed at Frost and his drinking pal Dylan Thomas, and moments of tenderness toward his wife. But the dominant tone is cold despair. One of the last poems recalls a night spent at Critic Richard Blackmur's house in Maine...
Almost the whole book is dialogue, and it is truly a bravura performance. Higgins is a master of the colorful street language heard around Boston. Throughout the novel, without quaintness or self-parody, he is able to sustain long arias of criminal shoptalk. The reason is that he never merely transcribes. Like Salinger and Raymond Chandler, his ear is really for mental processes. All Eddie's friends use the same idiom, but it is always easy to know which one is talking...