Word: reader
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GIMMICKRY and sentimentality are not enough. A good book of poetry should be both well-written and philosophical, expressing a cohesion of experience. Flying Inland, by Kathleen Spivack, is neither. Spivack's poetry lacks a unifying voice. Each poem remains a solitary, cricket-like rasp, grating in the reader's ear. Nothing justifies printing poor writing in any case, and nothing justifies placing these poems in a collection...
...18th century Mafia capo trying to manage overextended holdings and control his greedy relatives. Burgess seeks to evoke the heaving spirit of the Napoleonic age by rouging (and noiring) the historical facts with catchy dialogue and fantasy. As he points out in a closing epistle to the reader, written in rhymed couplets...
...Awwk! Awwk!" sings Anthony Burgess in a loud, hoarse baritone. "Those E-flat major chords get the reader awake." Then in deep, funereal tones, quoting from his own book, he continues: "There he lies/ Ensanguinated tyrant/ O bloody, bloody tyrant/ See/ How the sin within/ Doth incarnadine/ His skin/ From the shin to the chin." "Perhaps," he adds, "Knopf should have given away a free record with every copy...
...burly stream with its share of trout," which-what's this? -"rises in northern China, meanders through an Indian reservation in central Wisconsin, and empties finally into Croton Lake not a mile from where I live in southern New York State." The novel's epigraph, the reader notes with a sense of having been sandbagged, is a whimsy of the trout-fishing sage, Sparse Grey Hackle, who says that the water of the Hassayampa "renders those who drink it incapable of telling the truth...
...summary, such goings-on may sound hopelessly elfin, self-indulgent or absurd. But Jones' surrealist fragments produce in the reader's mind the same edgy excitement and slight disorientation that a suburban householder feels upon entering wild country. It is a delicately calculated trick, but it works. Easy slashes of cruelty cut the airy imagining. " Try this,' I told my son. I handed him a two-ounce, slightly chewed Yellow Cab with a treble hook mounted on the front bumper ... Inside a minute, he had three wiggling pedestrians on the hook ... One was a girl...