Word: poetes
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...very title is mystifying. It seems to belong on a memoir by a minor, faintly boring old poet. It perches rather uneasily atop a story in which Robert, a sweet, dim maintenance man (a woofly Ewan McGregor), replaced by a robot, decides to revenge himself on his rich, cruel boss (Ian Holm) by kidnapping the boss's daughter Celine (a sleek Cameron Diaz). She, naturally, turns out to be spoiled, smart, willful and eager to collaborate in ripping off Daddy...
...footnotes, which ruins the tale's momentum but makes for some informative side trips. Who knew that the Elks, the fraternal organization, was started by New York actors who worked all week and needed a Sunday wateringhole? Or that Darrow chose struggling writers for law partners, including the poet Edgar Lee Masters, whose classic Spoon River Anthology, Lukas asserts, borrowed from Darrow's own first novel, Farmington...
...recent years, the Foundation has brought such notable speakers as former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali, poet and author Maya Angelou, author Graham Greene and ChangLin Tien, former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley...
...plot is hardly a consolation when the scenes on which it depends can hardly command a modicum of even vague interest from readers. True, the novel's pages bleed together, but Bleeding London is a wounded creature. A writer once said of Ezra Pound, "he is a great poet who has never written a great poem." In the world of lyric prose, Nicholson neither leads nor follows. Rather, he occupies that awkward region in between--usually above reproach, seldom awe-inspiring--where many decent writers languish in anonymity. Bleeding London is, well, bloody awful...
Memoirs of a Geisha is crammed with wonderful sentences; Golden's language is almost overwhelming. He is fond of verbal special effects, and his prose reads almost like a poet's at times Image follows metaphor, which follow conceit, which follows simile. There is proliferation of "like" and "seemed and imaginative figures of speech are densely crammed together. Sometime Golden's images ring false--raindrop that hit "like quail eggs," a sky "extravagant with stars," a retired geisha "more terrified of fire than beer is of a thirst...