Word: idioms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...moment at least, the South continues to cherish its language. In the South, as in no other American region, people use language as it surely was meant to be employed: a lush, personal, emphatic treasure of coins to be spent slowly and for value. Thus, in Southern idiom, no lady is merely pregnant; she is "in bloom" or "her bees are aswarming." Girls are variously "ugly as homemade soap" or "pretty as a speckled pup." It does not rain in the South; it "comes up a cloud." For young children, the mystery of the belly button is easy to explain...
...right hand window-to Connemara and Aranmore, seen out the door, to the left-hand view of the Great Blasket "forbidding as an otherworldly eel, lying languidly on the wavetops". O'Nolan-na Gopaleen-O'Coonassa pulls the world in to the heart of Gaelic country and idiom. A chain of personae is a trademark of O'Nolan's literary career--in At Swim, as in O'Nolan's life, there is a writer who creates a writer who creates a writer. But in The Poor Mouth the technique has a specific function: to carry the Gaeligore and/na Gopaleen enthusiast...
...carried this sense of motion and drive. Kirchner, in comments on this work, has emphasized the extent to which he has retained roots in music like the Back, rather than concentrating only on the "nowness" of modern music. The Concerto reflects this concern, as Kirchner writes in the modern idiom, but with warmth and not numbing austerity. On Tuesday night, the brass and percussion were especially noteworthy; the former carrying out their role as an antiphonal block, the latter as understated punctuation. Lawrence Lesser, cello, and Robert Portney, violin, fit well into the ensemble sound--both have tended toward romantic...
...they formally freed her and sent her on a visit to London, where she arranged for publication of her work. Her poems, often on religious or patriotic themes, occasionally lapse into sentimentality. It is also apparent that her favorite reading is Pope's translation of Homer. Within this idiom, which can so easily descend to jog trot, she frequently so descends. But in all fairness it must be admitted that no other poet currently writing in the Colonies does much better...
...writes best of failure and disillusionment--when his expression and insight has the strength of bitterness. Then he conveys poignantly a sense of his lonely impermanence and racial insecurity. But when he analyses race relations, commercialism, political organization, the American dream, or sex, he lapses into the weakest idiom of his other book--a sportswriter's mire of expressions like "real pro," "top condition...