Word: wain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years. It is, necessarily, a modest affair compared with the immense Constable show at the Tate Gallery in 1976, which was the kind of exhibition that defines the image of an artist for a generation. Many favorites are not here, starting with The Hay Wain, the most reproduced landscape in English painting-a sort of vegetative Mona Lisa. But the show was curated by the world's leading Constable specialist, Graham Reynolds, formerly of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and it serves as a delightful refresher course for those who know Constable and a brilliant introduction...
...without much crispness of language. His Collected Poems 1944-1979 is, as any bag of 35 years' worth of anything has every right to be, a bit of a hodge podge. There are some prematurely-greying early works of some elegance, rather reminiscent of early Philip Larkin or John Wain ("Belgian Winter," "Retrospect"); there is some doggerel ("Fair Shares for All"); there is some sophomoric drivel ("Toys," "Report"); there are fine things ("Science Fiction," "A Song of Experience"--the latter with witty, well-crafted verses like "He tried all colours, white and black, and coffee/Though quite a few were chary...