Word: prose
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry and not for Joseph Brodsky. His own verse is taut with nouns and verbs: "I said fate plays a game without a score,/ and who needs fish if you've got caviar?" But prose allows the Soviet-born exile to present himself in full figures of speech. Most of the essays in this first collection have appeared in magazines and literary journals; together they parade an extravagant talent and an uncompromising intelligence that equates aesthetics with morality: bad art indicates a bad character...
Both Czar and revolutionary were despots under whom persecuted Russians managed to write and appreciate great poetry and prose. Both gave their names to Brodsky's city. He, in turn, adds a dimension that makes it difficult to return to ordinary reality. The Neva and its canals, he says, make Leningrad narcissistic: "Reflected every second by thousands of square feet of running silver amalgam, it's as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, / which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland...
...heaven that segregates poets and prose writers suits Brodsky. The supre macy of prosody is a theme he plays backward, forward and sideways throughout his book. If metrical language is the pinnacle of civilization, Brodsky is free to put poets at the top of the heap. He anoints Auden as "the greatest mind of the twentieth century," a brash though not unattractive idea if readers allow themselves to be swept along by Brodsky's passionate discourse on Auden's premonitory war poem "September 1, 1939." The work is reimagined rather than reduced by the usual critical method...
Even by the combative standards of partisan political prose, accusing the Democrats of bedding down with the Kremlin in the cause of Soviet expansionism is more than a little extreme. The author of this statement, which appeared last week in the Washington Post, has never been known for moderation, however. Indeed, he cheerfully scorns...
Robert Ludlum knows what all successful storytellers and hamburger makers know: the public likes consistency. A Ludlum novel reads like a Ludlum novel, just as a Big Mac tastes like a Big Mac. The Bourne Supremacy is doubly familiar. The hairy-chested prose ("No man was a match for him; no eyes, no throat, no groin safe from an assault, swift and agonizing") and the conspiratorial plotting are stock Ludlum. So is the hero, Jason Bourne. Readers of The Bourne Identity (1980) will recognize him as the cover name for David Webb, the American Orientalist who was used to lure...