Word: lyric
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...been assumed that they used up the territories of the rural backwater and the prep school. Padgett Powell's twelve-year-old Simons Manigault is proof that they did not. He is in fact one of the most engaging fictional small fry ever to cry thief: sly, pungent, lyric, funny, and unlikely to be forgotten when literary-prize committees gather later in the year. Edisto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 183 pages; $11.95) is an impressive first novel. Powell, 31, a Houston roofer, has all the literary equipment for a new career: a peeled eye, a tuning-fork...
...Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in 1939, is an extended lyric poem, and was the first appearance of "negritude" in print. In choosing the word, its creators had simply latinized the derogatory word for black in French (negre) and attached an augmentative suffix. Lacking in English ****equivalent, the term has no absolute definition. Cesaire chose to show negritude in relation to its negation so as to illustrate its strength...
...these guys. Kander's tunes have the catchy dissonance of a Broadway traffic snarl just before show time; violins cower mutely in the pit while the percussion sets a tempo of edgy energy and the horns bleat like Kurt Weill's orphaned children. Ebb never wrote a lyric as clawing as the imaginary one cited above, but he revels in devising anthems of urban indomitability. Everything that outsiders hate about New York City-its grime and pace, its inhabitants' steamroller pugnacity-Ebb sees as fodder for his romantic cynicism. If a Kander-Ebb song rarely reveals deeper...
...COMPLETE LYRICS OF COLE PORTER; Knopf; 354 pages; $30 THE LYRICS OF NOëL COWARD; Overlook Press; 418 pages; $25 "Strange how potent cheap music is," wrote Noël Coward about one of his own songs. He was partly right: the melody and rhythm proved irresistible, but the lyric ("Some day I'll find you,/ Moonlight behind you") provided the real power. In an enduring song, notes beguile the ear; words build a home in the mind...
...historians. He demonstrates such courage and self-denial: The Discoverers is chock-full of particulars and laced with sobering facts. We see how the botanist Linnaeus originated the idea of species by looking at the sex organs of plants (and how he inspired Charles Darwin's grandfather to write lyric poems about plants' amours). We learn how fastidious anatomists preserved for centuries their ignorance about the true form of the human body by relegating the unsavory dissection to barber-surgeons, while they read about the body in books...