And now, there it came looming into view: an austere block-wide low-slung hive of graphite-gray monoliths: monoface rectangular plinths arrayed in a regular perpendicular grid over gently undulating terrain—more than three thousand of them...
Edgar Allan Poe, that strange genius of a hack writer, lived in such a narcissistic cocoon of torment as to be all but blind to the booming American nation around him, and so, perversely, became a mythic presence in the American literary...
Abandon hope of sober analysis here: a new Frost poem has surfaced. There is something new in the old voice, another song in a stanza-form packed with salt and built to last, another note struck upon war broken out far away and near while...
As his reputation has grown, however, into that oxymoronic epithet “famous poet,” Strand has engaged that self, satirized it, and refashioned it as a subject for his poems. If Richard Howard is right when he says that “the poems . . ...
We parents signed in and entered the waiting area of the boys’ ward that doubled as a family room during visiting hours. We migrated to the far corners of the room, as far away as possible from one another, as if afraid of contagion. Maybe...
House of War is a history of intricate and momentous decisions made by powerful and complicated personalities, beginning with the decision that has shadowed and will shadow all subsequent human life: the decision to use the atomic bomb...
Then retrieved my book and kept reading, because finally I was understanding France. I had lived in Paris a number of times before: twelve months across 1977 and ’78, six months in 1998, the summer of 2001, perhaps as many as a dozen...
