Word: larkins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...disturbing part about this trend is Harvard's collective failure to nip it in the bud; the efforts of Tomassoni and leaders like McCann have yet to sink in. Martins' retaliatory hook to Mike Larkin at the end of the Vermont game (costing the Crimson a chance at a game-winning power-play opportunity) may prove to be the crucial blow in the battle for discipline--if Tomassoni's benching of Martins fails to illustrate to his players the importance of not taking stupid penalties, it's hard to imagine what could. No matter what, Tomassoni's point that...
Drab as this existence may sound, it was the essence of Larkin's poetic impulse. The calculated isolation, the lack of commitment were what enabled , him to write what little he did (four volumes in 40 years), just as the fate of the mockingly ironic outsider was his persistent subject. As he put it, "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." Characteristically, he declined the post of poet laureate, but by the time he died of cancer at 63 in 1985, he had become a sort of grumpy unofficial laureate of all that was middling, thwarted and humorously...
Andrew Motion, a fellow poet and younger colleague of Larkin's at Hull, gets close to his subject, but not too close, in this finely nuanced book. The biographer is as shrewd and sympathetic in sorting out Larkin's surprisingly energetic sex life as in parsing his poems. Larkin's longest attachment (38 years) was with Monica Jones, a lecturer at Leicester University. About halfway through this affair he took up with Maeve Brennan, a library staff member at Hull, and a few years later he added his secretary, Betty Mackereth. The point was to play one woman off against...
Motion maintains a non-p.c. perspective about the crotchets that caused such an outcry when this biography, along with Larkin's collected letters, was published in England last year: the private man's coarseness, his penchant for pornography, his blasts against women and "niggers." Much of this, Motion makes clear, was boisterous role-playing, especially in matey letters to friends like Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest...
MUSIC Mariah Carey sings like an angel, but she needs some new material. THEATER A timeless comedy urges women to trade sex for peace. CINEMA Bad Behaviour is an improvised comedy about disheveled lives. BOOKS A lively biography of Philip Larkin, England's poet of gloom. TELEVISION The Wrong Man is sleazy, stinging film noir set in Mexico...