Word: skies
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fallacy, allowing meaning to creep in with the names and painting one side of the name instead of trying to reduce an ocean of meaning to an eyedropper. In "Clarence," she follows the thread of landscape as it spins out from the names of places. A Mayan hieroglyph means "sky", but not only sky-in the Guatemalan sky there also fly-or flew-quetzal birds, the source of ancient Indian folklore and mystery. Nye brings the bird naturally into her sky. She traces the connotations of each image down through the rest of the poem, so that the forward motion...
Carrying the fallacy further than nouns, Nye plays tricks with the language that, because they are not isolated, create extravagant ideas. When she works with living, solid images, the frivolity works ideas. When she works with living, solid images, the frivolity works because it has momentum. In "The Sky" she writes...
...West (again Hemingway turf), where McGuane lived and worked. Although McGuane, 42, moved to Livingston, Mont., in 1968, he has not mined the region until now. His Montana has none of the romantic magic of Zane Grey's glowing hills. In Nobody's Angel the sky is harsh, the mountains formidable, the rivers icebound. The town of Deadrock (read Livingston) is the focal point of this austere landscape. Here station wagons are parked where horses once were loosely tied...
Right away on the river, he heard a mating snlpe flinging itself about the sky in order to impress its female, with a faint laughing ululation such as children make when hooting with their hands in front of their mouths. He saw some sandpipers, or "teeter-tails," tipping their tails as they searched for invertebrates. A gray marsh hawk seized a dazed and chilly frog before his eyes, and half a dozen geese were still dawdling south of their nesting ground in passionate but wary pairs...
...national plumage. (The long interval between the patriotic eruption and the moment of actual contact also opens up room for negotiation.) A world apocalyptically armed has absorbed the notion that there will not be much safe territory in wars of the future: the war will fall out of the sky one afternoon and land on J.C. Penney's. But in the Falklands, we have a war-if it came to that-that would presumably be conducted in what used to be the great colonial Elsewhere, the distant and exotic battlefield that soldiers sail away to. It would...