Word: strand
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...Malign Strand. Now political kidnaping has come to the U.S., whether genuine as in California or possibly simply as a convenient cover in Georgia. Its advent is all the more unnerving because the history of flamboyant crimes is that they beget imitation. One skyjacking inspires another. As a result, perhaps not since the wave of fear brought on by the Lindbergh kidnaping in 1932 have families of wealth and position in the U.S. been so troubled about their safety. Though political in aim, the Hearst kidnaping was essentially a variant graft on that earlier malign strand of U.S. history...
...strangeness, Strand's room uses a poem about poetry effectively...
Poems about the writing of poems can be pretty unbearably self-indulgent or just plain dull. Strand makes you forget that, while Orr barely escapes the problem...
This room is slightly more gimmicky than Strand's; it leads to another place in the same manner Alice's lookingglass does. And this "other" world is never complete in any of Orr's poems because he uses a number of recurring symbols, which only become complete over a series of poems. Even common phrases like "threading" one's way through trees takes on a new meaning when, in another poem, a man's life is a "skull of red yarn/that unravels as he walks," and in still another poem, "behind you the dream burns the empty nests,/and before...
...remains in a dream where Strand only uses its structure. Burning the Empty Nests shouldn't scare you away just because it has a "symbolic structure." Despite the volume's occasional unevenness, its only bad effect is the craving for more it leaves behind...