Word: craftsmanly
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THREE weeks ago, a table was sold at auction in London. It had been made in France somewhere around 1780, probably by a craftsman named Martin Carlin: a spindly, exquisite and useless object, all tulipwood and Sevres porcelain plaques, the very epitome of the court taste of Louis XVI. An Iranian oilman named Henri Sabet paid $415,800 for it and so became the owner of the most expensive piece of furniture in history...
Christopher Davis, always a painstaking craftsman (Ishmael, Lost Summer), reacts to the situation by underwriting to the point of blandness. His subject is William Kemmler, an ignorant laborer who back in 1889 took a hatchet to his common-law wife when she complained of his sexual inadequacies at the wrong moment...
...Eden, Oedipus, St. George, all our prototypes of beauty, heroism and love, are reduced to so much pulsing, thrashing sinew, murderously intent on survival. A harsh and one-sided view, to be sure, yet difficult to deny. The headlines are on its side. Hughes is too cunning a craftsman to try to convey his vision in headlines or rant of any kind. Instead of giving it full vent, he gives it narrow vent -through 66 short, spare poems cast as tales or fables, like fragments of some folk epic. The effect is like that of a torrent forced through...
...Craftsman...
...seem compelled to write about them. Religious poetry is perhaps the most difficult kind of poetry to write, certainly the most difficult to write well. Berryman, alas, does not succeed. Some of this section is passable, but much of it is like the first "Address": "Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflakes...