Word: penumbras
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Though he set his 20 previous novels in widely different locales, Author Graham Greene has always concentrated on a single terrain: the shadow zone where betrayal meets despair. This moral penumbra may fall across an entire country or bisect a drawing room or a double bed. Ordinary people can pass through it ignorantly and unharmed, save for the occasional grotesque accident. The only ones constantly in jeopardy are the marginal men in a skeptical century, those knowingly burdened with a soul that is eligible for damnation...
...pastoral, he bestows his work with so much energy that every poem seems to perpetuate itself, with each line flowing into the next. His book contains only a few flaws. For one, Heaney's line breaks seem a bit contrived. Sometimes, too, the poet couples abstractions, such as "sibilant penumbra" or "mellowed clarities" which ask too much of the reader, even the active one. Finally, his detached version of the Ugolino episode in Cantos 32 and 33 of Dante's Inferno, which concludes Field Work, does not measure up to the profundity of his personal lyrics...