Word: reader
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...true heart of the poems is found in these comments. It is not actually the objects that Salter is writing about but rather perceptions of those objects. The reader is drawn in by these perceptions. Seeing through Salter's eyes, we begin to understand her connections, how her mind works. In "Libretto" images of a record player and a silk couch lead to the past, so we see what these images mean to the narrator...
...more often, Salter's poems have a certain freshness, using everyday occurences as gateways to show the reader paths of ideas he never would guessed at. At one point, she hears children playing the game Marco Polo and speaks of the sounds as "heightened with the importance of the half-understood." Salter's poems make us feel that everything around us is only half-understood, that everything has depths. She does not explore all these depths, but simply shows a bit of what she sees behind these objects, what they make her think of. In this way, she heightens...
...novelist currently writing in English does so with more energy, intelligence and allusiveness than Rushdie. Nearly every page of The Ground Beneath Her Feet offers something to arrest a devoted reader's attention: puns and wordplays galore ("Ma, keep mum"; "Where was a penthouse pent?") and enough literary echoes--of Joyce; Yeats; Frost; Dante; oh hell, of nearly everybody--to keep graduate students on the prowl through these pages for years. But for all of Rushdie's brilliance, the parts of this novel seem greater than the sum of its whole...
...nothing else, Assassin deserves praise for encouraging undergraduates to think well while always remembering they are involved too in a game demanding some level of awareness. Harvard tends to reward total thinking, the welding of reader with book, the stopping of time in darkroom or laboratory. But only in the rarest of situations is such focus wholly safe. Always a scrap of mindfulness must caress the environment, noting perhaps the softly closing door, the far-off squeak, the scent of perfume or smoke or fear, the look crossing someone's eyes. Full and undivided attention encourages all sorts of surprise...
...nothing else, Assassin deserves praise for encouraging undergraduates to think well while always remembering they are involved too in a game demanding some level of awareness. Harvard tends to reward total thinking, the welding of reader with book, the stopping of time in darkroom or laboratory. But only in the rarest of situations is such focus wholly safe. Always a scrap of mindfulness must caress the environment, noting perhaps the softly closing door, the far-off squeak, the scent of perfume or smoke or fear, the look crossing someone's eyes. Full and undivided attention encourages all sorts of surprise...