Word: undertows
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...that changes before it can barely be experienced. Still Learning How to Crawl takes this theme of sentimental education and extends it past the age of anxiety into a kind of perpetual present tense, where lessons learned lead only to renewed uncertainty. Death of a Train has a real undertow of prairie melancholy, and The Unbreakable Chain is a little like a Lanois echo of Series of Dreams, a rhythmic rumination on the elisions of fantasy and desire...
...rich, informative and diverting as these pieces are, they are accompanied by a melancholy undertow. Mitchell's home base recently underwent its own convulsive change of management. There remains the hope that an improvement is in the wind. Failing that, Up in the Old Hotel will not only celebrate a New York that is gone. It will also recall a New Yorker that, like so many of the people Mitchell interviewed two generations ago, exists only as a wistful memory...
There is a primal undertow that captures the hearts of most Americans 10 years or so out of high school and sweeps them back to stand in chalky reveries, reaching for a faded moment of innocence...
...classic good ol' boy who oppresses his wife, sexually harasses his secretary ("There are laws about safety in the workplace and you just ignore 'em with those hazardous things o' yours, Miss Undertow"), and makes speeches about the "brown tide of wetbacks" encroaching on "this great white nation...
...family has a pain or two: an iridescent liar, a middle-aged infant, a little Iago. But somehow, in Sexton's case, it turned out that the pain was also entangled with a miracle: the miracle of her 45-year-long survival, for one thing, when such a terrible undertow was pulling her, and the miracle of her poems, or some of them at least -- the dark, intelligent objects that she floated toward shore before she went under...