Word: elegiacally
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...Hoffman, a former columnist for the now defunct Chicago Daily News and for the Washington Post, writes with occasional Second City vulgarity and feistiness. But he can also display an elegiac grace about a world in which everything, everywhere, has suddenly gone wrong: "Heading along the street to where he had parked his car, he looked up and saw a dark red, liver-colored sky, full of ores and oxides and particulates. The droughts of last summer had been followed by the winds of November. Although Allan did not know it, he was seeing the State of Oklahoma blowing past...
...author, a novelist when closer to home (The Eye of the Beholder, Byzantine Honeymoon), suits up in deflective irony for a different game: to produce a travel book with the confident style of the 19th century and the elegiac soul of a modern spiritual nomad. Glazebrook's reflections on the past are a form of detachment as real as the thousands of miles between him and his family in Dorset. Writing about other travel writers distances him from his own encounters on the trail. By ranking subjectivity above literal facts, he finally removes himself to that lonely height where...
...found himself walking a picket line as a member of the striking Newspaper Guild. In The Ink Truck, the real is bent into the surreal. Dingy neighborhoods are weirdly illuminated by arsonists' flames; alleys echo to pagan rites; Old World myths are superimposed on the present. There are elegiac hallucinations of the past and an up-to-date orgy, a perky sketch of a bare female torso, and batty headlines, such as PIGS ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM, OUTLAW DECIDES: SOUL IS A PORK CHOP, HE DISCOVERS...
...from which he stares like an eagle just slightly startled to find himself prematurely taxidermized-has also conspired to suggest that his plays have a savor too rarefied for the palates of most theatergoing mortals. It is true that in writing, staging and performance, his plays are ethereal, austere, elegiac, pioneering a dramatic form that whittles existence into essence. But this is to say only that Beckett is a master of theatrical effect and a poet of the darkest human emotions. Though his characters are haunted specters speaking in liturgical monotone, there is music in the monotones; there is passion...
Fools of Fortune unfolds with the inevitability of Attic drama. The elegiac chapters and the grieving mood are expertly drawn, though dolefully unchanging. Similarly, the characters have perfect tragic pitch but limited range. They are, as Trevor obviously intended, ghostly creations speaking beyond pasion and hope. -By R.Z. Sheppard...