I had come to characterize my deployment this way: it came at the tail end of a war that few regarded with interest anymore, a war that became more violent as we sought harder to stabilize it.
Virgil, we soon suspect, is not merely the abstract apex of human piety and reason but the great poet whom Dante sought hardest to emulate, a charming individual who has not been admitted to Paradise, for the simple reason that he lived too early to accept Christ's offer of salvation.
The Merval index has risen 56percentthis yearas Argentinesneseekek hard assets to protect wealth from a severe financial crisis and a sharply devalued currency.
But the frantic effort to sell the diamonds afterward was so ham-handed that some who watch the industry have begun to doubt the robbers were after diamonds at all, but were instead seeking hard cash.
Yet the Kremlin's reputation for seeking hard assets abroad in exchange for aid prompted speculation that negotiations were dragging as it bargained for stakes in offshore gas fields and Cypriot banks.
One way is to skip over the glowing patient testimonials and seek hard data about the medication's risks and how it performed in clinical trials.
These visionary poems seek hard-won wisdom and pared-down forms, like those Louise Glück discovered in "The Wild Iris," but mostly fall short of those stringent precedents.
