A GARDEN FROM A HUNDRED PACKETS OF SEED (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18), by James Fenton, is a loose essay strung along a numerical list of seeds, from No. 1, Pheasant's Eye (Adonis aestivalis), to No.+100, Willow Gentian (Gentiana asclepiadea).
The main thing this biennial has going for it, though, is a point of view -- idiosyncratic, hermetic, even kooky though it may be -- that makes the show read a bit like a loose, discursive essay.
Deb's book is a loose collection of essays detailing his travels in the nation, narrated in the first person.
Barr's essay loosed a cascade of criticism from poets and teachers already wary of the foundation's agenda: "horrifying," "anti-intellectual," "anti-education" were some of the responses I heard.
In his 1992 collection of essays, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture War, he wrote that the role of Afro-American studies was nothing less than 'to redefine how the nation defines itself', yet Harvard is one of only a handful of colleges offering degrees in the subject.
Two exceptions were "War Memories," an essay whose loose, bittersweet style anticipates Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up," and "Manacled," a short story about an actor trapped in handcuffs and leg irons as a theatre burns down.
In his latest collection of essays, a loose follow-up to 1988's "Holidays in Hell," O'Rourke, now a retired war correspondent, attempts to recapture the ironic spirit of his busman's holidays in Lebanon, Poland and El Salvador.
He then essays a loose drive at Swann's fifth delivery, completely misses and whirls round to see the ball disappearing to the boundary for byes, having turned past the stumps and evaded Prior on its way through.
Dr. Johnson's dictionary defined an essay as "a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece".
Like Dr. Johnson, she sees the essay as a "loose sally of the mind" or -- true to its Montaignean root in the French verb essayer -- something tried but not necessarily accomplished.
Structurally, "Ghosts of the Fireground" bounces between following Father Pernin through Peshtigo and taking the reader along on the adventures of Leschak's crew during the busy summer of 2000, mixing in fire service history and glimpses of Leschak's spiritual journey as it goes, until the book has the loose feel of a personal essay or meditation.
