Word: poetic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Other less traumatic mix-ups are bound to arise as Americans trade in their historic furlongs, acres, bushels and pecks for the more rational, if less poetic meters, hectares and liters. Some conversions, though, will be learned more quickly than others: getting a traffic ticket for driving 50 miles per hour in a 50 kilometer-per-hour zone will probably help drivers adjust to the new system. And a few changes will be happy ones. Leon Jaroff, editor of the Science and Medicine sections, reminds us that "if your weight is 166 lbs., the scale will read only 76 kilograms...
...monologue about a train journey across the map of the U.S. that contains every old movie cliche, engrained national myth, sentimental hyperbole and travel-brochure bait ever known to a British tourist, or to many an American for that matter. As Brooke masterfully delivers it, this becomes a manic poetic aria of cumulative exhilaration...
...sons had died in the war, she discovered what every cub police reporter finds -the survivors' numbness, an element of blank, nothing much to say. All of the Viet Nam decade, of course, was filled with grotesqueries, wild ricochets of irony. Emerson recalls the case of a poetic 22-year-old private whose job it was to compose elaborate-and totally fictitious-battle citations for senior officers who wished to leave Viet Nam with a Silver Star. The secretary of a local draft board in Gordonsville. Tenn. tells Emerson: "Five died [from here], but they were all volunteers, none...
Drawing almost exclusively on Thomas's prose, including A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and Quite Early One Morning, Williams sifts with poetic brilliance through the author's memories and fantasies of childhood. These emerge as a series of sharply recollected details amid word paintings of character and scene. Plot is virtually non-existent, but the details themselves are indelible. Bob the embezzler is a "small absconding man," who under accusation smiles "like a razor." One woman is observed to have "painted her face as though it were a wall." Thomas himself is described as a "bombastic...
...materialism with "a revolutionary saying that 'man shall not live by bread alone but by every word of God.'" To his credit as a propagandist, Schumacher never forces his religious beliefs on the reader. But neither does one leave this book feeling that religious references are made for poetic effect...