Word: deadness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Fisherman notes, "Lowell was a Christian, and he was probably right to resort to the metaphor of fishing for his purpose. Christianity is an aquarium . . . in the fourth century, the cross was not the prevailing symbol for the Man-Fisher; the fish was . . . when ((Jesus)) rose from the dead and went up on the Mount, he took with him only three, all fishermen...
...martyrs' cemetery south of Tehran, where red water symbolizing martyrs' blood flows from a fountain. Every day bulldozers work at the cemetery, carving out new rectangular plots the size of Olympic swimming pools for those slain in battle. Gravediggers say they fill one with bodies in two weeks. The dead arrive so rapidly that pieces of cardboard, usually stapled with photographs of the fallen, mark burial sites until marble slabs can be put in place. Wives and mothers in chadors, the flowing black robes, move silently through the rows of grave markers, washing the dust away from one, squatting silently...
...child--as they are sedimented in grammars of address--and of the rhetorical assumptions of personhood contained within poems and Constitutional amendments offers no answer to the ongoing abortion dilemma among feminists. Rather, Johnson warns how the complex issues too easily become locked into the rhetorical limits of dead-end polemics. Her refusal to intervene between pro-life and pro-choice factions, and wish upon them "a single voice," offers intellectual self-questioning as an alternative to political violence...
...world. In any event, the wind doesn't "sing" through the Aleppo pines in these parts so much as it tries to uproot them (the hardest evidence of its vigor is on the barn's tin roof; but for the weight of a slew of dead tires, nature would snatch away that galvanized hat). Violets grow in the yard year-round and tulips in spring. Off in one direction the Whetstone Mountains glower; in another, the Empire Mountains; in another, the Huachucas; in another, the Dragoons, big and little. Birds in the air include meadowlarks, a splash of yellow...
Equally frisky are Simmons' descriptions of Belles Lettres' book conferences (Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings is presented as "the Old Testament written by Mel Brooks, the 'Book of the Dead' by Henry Miller, the Iliad by Woody Allen, the head of Nefertiti by Red Grooms"), an intraoffice scandal about an aging office boy who enriches himself by selling review copies as well as slots on the best-seller list, and a Shakespeare hoax that brings down the magazine's lowbrow chief, Newbold Press. Simmons demonstrates his versatility by composing nine "lost" sonnets by the Bard...