Word: poetes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Forget April. January is the cruelest month for moviegoers. Nobody in the picture business is bringing forth lilies to enliven the poet's "dead land." While everyone's attention is fixed on the Oscar nominations, it's the moment for cheesy slasher epics and the reluctant release of last year's failed genre effort, movies that may mix "memory and desire" but only in the most unappetizing ways...
...into his black shoulder bag and you'll simply find a 3B pencil fixed to an octavo notebook with an elastic band. These days it's all the writer needs for his mobile office, as his best tool is a superbly exercised imagination. Ever since the then aspiring young poet left Brisbane for a 10,000-km walking trek around the Mediterranean almost 50 years ago, Hall has worked best off the leash. Much of his creatively vast colonial trilogy, which began with 1988's Captivity Captive and ended with the 1993 Miles Franklin Award?winning The Grisly Wife...
...will soon tie the knot. Below it, jostling for space with a piece about the Soduku craze sweeping India, was the revelation from a new biography that the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, conducted some sort of love affair with Saraladevi Chaudhuri, the married niece of acclaimed Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore...
...life. Just 30, he plays the character from his early 20s to his 60s and is persuasive for most of that span, though I wouldn't have minded if his dad had taken over in the later scenes. (Amitabh wouldn't agree. He said recently: "My father [the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan] wrote in his biography, ?When a father loses to his son, it is his greatest victory!' I've lost to my son! And I'm the happiest father alive!") Early in the film, Abhishek uses his dimples to underline the notion of innocent ambition. As the character ages...
...poet like Owen leading trench charges in World War I seems no more senseless than paratroopers leading humvee convoys in Iraq. But as we look backward at our lost 3,000, it's worth hoping one more time that the ending stanza for the paratroopers today will be better than Owen's. He was killed in action trying to take a canal from German defenses, just one week before the Armistice ended the war for good. He never saw his verse published in a book. War can make poets and war can kill them...