Word: taut
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...first novels have been embraced with such praise and sympathy as Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird-a taut, savage story of a stray city boy's brutalization by Middle European peasants during World War II. Three years after it was published in 1965, Kosinski won the National Book Award for Steps, a montage of violent and sadistic episodes perceived with an almost fetishistic precision. Being There is a change of pace, a tantalizing knuckle ball of a book delivered with perfectly timed satirical hops and metaphysical flutters...
...Hughes. Let others waft upward in attenuated dawns and high-blown rhetoric. Hughes stays below, foraging over a gritty landscape, battening onto whatever is starkly elemental. For him, poetry is "the record of how the forces of the universe try to redress some balance disturbed by man." In his taut, compulsive poems, both the error and its redress are usually violent, sometimes disgusting, occasionally awesome. From a bullet-pierced soldier's helmet come "cordite oozings of Gallipoli." Giant crabs, "God's only toys," tear each other apart. Even a thistle is "a grasped fistful of splintered weapons." Hughes...
...stand behind every moral platitude. Excessive length and repetitiveness are the major drawbacks Loot has as a play, but a failure of momentum must, inevitably, hobble black comedy unless a compelling basis for suspense gives coherence to the dramatic situation. Case in point: Secret Ceremony, listless, enervated; Pale Fire, taut, compelling...
...Vladimir and Paul B. Price's Estragon. As the slave Lucky, Anthony Holland mimes with the aching dignity of a Marceau, though his master, Pozzo (Edward Winter) is a shade too Blimpish. This is Alan Schneider's finest piece of directing since Virginia Woolf-sentient, taut, sharp as the image in a jeweler's glass...
...horses he once rode across the British Columbian mountains. His back is straight as the arrows with which he shot deer and bear. His face is a seamed reflection of prairie hardships, crowned by a flowing silver mane. He is 71, but his belly is still taut from a daily regimen of 15 pushups. When asked if he likes life in a place like New York, Dan George is apt to shake his head gently and reply, "No, it is not a good place to live. You have to look...