Word: graspingly
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Napoleon was not the only one who failed to grasp this essential rule. Eve Merriam, a poet who should know better, has broken it in her latest book, The Nixon Poems. Eve Merriam is no mean poet, and some of her work has been quite first-rate. She is one of the few winners of the Yale Younger Poets Prize who have ever been heard from again. This latest collection fails miserably, however, because of its subject, not its author. No great poetry can be written about Richard Nixon, for he is not important to men or to mankind...
...setting is the fictitious Lesser Antillean island of Queimada (Portuguese for "burn") in the 1830s. Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) is an adventurer employed by the British Admiralty to foment a revolution in the Portuguese colony. Walker realizes that the island's blacks are too downtrodden to grasp political rebellion, so he invites them to participate in something they can appreciate: a bank robbery. He baits a strapping porter named José Dolores (Evaristo Marquez) to anger, then decides he is the man to lead the black bandits. With Machiavellian guile he hides the bandits in a jungle village...
...that this time Mrs. Spark herself has succumbed to the powers of her prose. Despite her sheer skill and concision-or perhaps because of them-the book is too schematic. It also seems a rather self-consciously "modern" novel. Though the author's descriptive grasp of madness is frightening, Lise appears to suffer from an almost textbook urban psychosis. She is set about with a clutter of literary devices: the contrast between the repressed North and the chaotic South, the carefully anonymous settings, the intrusive hints that Lise is either like a street whore or a bride...
Like every educated traveler in those pre-Kodak years, Andersen drew assiduously while journeying through Portugal, Spain and Italy. But these diary drawings are trite; in their grasp of the conventions of realistic landscape, they are far below the sketched views and water-colors made by his nearest English equivalent, Edward Lear. But in his fantasy doodles, collages and paper cutouts, Andersen's vision flowered in a lyrical and fearsome way. In such work, he emerges as an accident of history-a previously unrecognized link between the 19th century Romantics and the 20th century Surrealists, sharing their common delight...
...Lindbergh of these journals is a man so sensitive and perceptive that he studies with understanding the eyes of caged animals in a zoo, and yet so insensitive and unperceiving that he fails to grasp that there was anything wrong in openly baiting American Jews. Herbert Hoover shared Lindbergh's view that the Roosevelt Administration, Jews and Anglophiles were deliberately leading the nation toward World War II. But when he chided Lindbergh in 1941 for saying so publicly Lindbergh was uncomprehending. He still...