Word: westwards
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...island called California, on the right hand of the Indies, very near the Earthly Paradise," wrote a 16th century Spanish fantasist in a novel that gave the Golden State its name. California and other stretches of the Pacific shore would become the fated and fateful destinations of adventurous journeys westward by European settlers, cowboys, miners, Forty- Niners and dreamers. There the travelers would pass, or so they hoped, from their old lives -- and the Old World -- into a heaven on earth. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1879 at the end of a long trip West, "At every turn...
Gorbachev's success may turn on his ability to bend Landsbergis to his will. -- Westward Ho! After a heady election, East Germans face the hard task of shaping a new government. -- Vaclav Havel delivers bad news to budding terrorists...
...WESTWARD...
...Archaic Figure (1987), added to Clampitt's reputation and, perhaps too readily, the verbiage at which she can be a little too facile. With her gift for images, gigantic vocabulary and command of classical literature, she might have become a parody of the ornate Gerard Manley Hopkins. Westward, thankfully, reverses that tendency. It still helps to know that Mulciber is another name for the fire god Vulcan, and that punto in aria is a kind of lace. But these poems speak directly to the reader, as if the writer had discarded the scrim of erudition...
...elegiac title poem Westward is about another journey, from London's Euston Station by rail toward the Western Isles of Scotland. Contemplating Margaret Thatcher's England, she reflects on the "frayed-/ out gradual of the retreat from empire." The Prairie is a reverie, expressed with extreme simplicity, on the peregrinations of her forebears from the Midwest to California and back again. "To be landless, half a nomad, nowhere wholly/ at home, is to discover, now, an epic theme/ in going back," she concludes. Clampitt is wisest when she is plainest. At her best, she writes poetry that, in Marianne Moore...