Word: smith
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Although the alternative atmosphere may be ruined, from a business prospect, the large chains have brought in other genres of people and I don't think they have hurt the Square at all," says Tower Records manager Tracey Smith...
Hardy himself seems to have viewed biographers as carrion feeders, and he labored mightily to ward them off. He did so manipulatively and obliquely -- by writing an autobiography that would appear as a biography under the name of his second wife Florence. Seymour-Smith can't quite acknowledge how characteristically -- and fascinatingly -- underhanded this step was. Things turned still more devious when Florence, after Hardy's death, reworked some passages to make his first wife Emma look more guileful and sly. What spy thriller could possibly top this for intricate ironies? Florence actually opened herself up to accusations of dishonesty...
...pleasure when Seymour-Smith leaves off squabbling to examine Hardy's verse. Of course, the poems are full of squabbling too, but mostly it's the poet arguing with himself. Seymour-Smith does an admirable job of promoting Hardy's poetry above all else -- above the television adaptations, the novels that inspired them and all the unsubstantiated but unshakable rumors about the writer's romantic pursuits. (he was -- take your pick -- impotent, licentiously heterosexual or repressedly homosexual.) Hardy's life makes clear that his poetry was paramount. He trained initially as an architect, abandoned that profession for novel writing, then...
Unfortunately, Seymour-Smith treats the poems as interesting chiefly for their personal revelations. He scants the trait that more than anything else defines Hardy as a poet: his structural inventiveness. The former architect retained a love of building. A recent study of Hardy estimates that he composed in more than 790 metrical forms. (A comparison with two other poets celebrated for their versatility is instructive: Swinburne wrote in about 420 forms; Browning in 200.) There's a great irony in this statistic. The most formally restless of English poets was, in his daily life, one of the most rooted...
...gasp rose in a Union, S.C., courtroom today when the prosecutor handling the Susan Smith case said he would seek the death penalty. Smith is charged with double homicide in the deaths of her two young sons. The young mother admitted in November that she had pushed her car into a lake with the toddlers strapped inside. In court today, Smith sobbed as the murder charges were read aloud, then returned to the defense table as her lawyer said she was not yet ready to enter a plea. (Judge Costa Pleiconas, who set the trial date for April 24, entered...