Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice. As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan. I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet. After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview . So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not. Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot. These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
A favorite of mine. I've always seen it as the perfect embodiment of the last lines of Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica."
ReplyDeleteA poem should not mean
But be.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteI like the poem very much, but I can't say much for most of the commentary on it. The poem sufficiently glosses itself and most of the commentary is puffed up and going nowhere. Not the piece I cited. But others. One would think that WCW had invented imagist poetry.
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeleteAgreed--the commentary does get a bit overheated.
It seems almost as if there is a law that says the shorter the poem, the longer the commentary/analysis.