At ease with forgotten manners, at ease with a sentence winding toward two final prepositions, Heaney manages to stiffen his syntax with an Anglo-Saxon rectitude of rhythm; yet where most poets live by eye, Heaney likes to press the reader's nose into the carnal stench of things.
BRANTLEY +'STEEL MAGNOLIAS' In Robert Harling's freeze-dried comedy, people speak in the kinds of sentences that wind up embroidered on decorative pillows: "There is no such thing as natural beauty," or, "I'd rather have 30 minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special".
(The smile on my face as I wrote that sentence!) Wind blows leaves clear across the battlefield, and you really get the sense that, well, it probably wasn't fun to be a soldier back then.
But mostly there was the feeling that a newly begun sentence could wind up going almost anywhere, crossing the plains into an unknown country or doubling back on a settlement that suddenly looked different than it did the first time we passed it.
And since all of that is being offered through unfolding time, the sentences begin to wind around themselves, the way thoughts do.
To appreciate "Dance," it also helps to have a taste for labyrinthine sentences that wind endlessly (and amusingly) round their shrewdly placed colons and semicolons.
His exploratory, winding sentences were there in Ford's notebooks.
"It would be like telling John Updike to write long, winding sentences but make sure they're happy ones," he said.
As ever, Margaret Jull Costa translates his long, winding sentences into beautiful English prose, both erudite and conversational – a considerable stylistic feat.
Jacobson, who talks in pitter-patter, winding sentences, is driven, fixated and, by his own admission, a control freak.
