It solidified his reputation as perhaps the most accomplished blank-verse writer in the second half of the 20th century with such passages as: My shadow moves, until, at noon, I stand Within its seal, as in the finished past.
We understand from the fussy diction and from the jokes that this is not a person given to spasms of rapture; as with many such passages in her poems, a fundamental asperity, never surrendered for very long, makes her sudden joy all the more moving.
By the time one such passage peters out with the frustrated writer typing "THIS IS JUST POINTLESS FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK", the reader feels it would be rude to disagree.
"Leave it," Mrs. Kennedy wrote of one such passage.
"I think I am someone," reads one such passage.
Such passages, along with those describing Gwen's monstrous mother -- a thwarted actress who looked at her daughter and said things like, "How could I have produced such a creature?" -- seem oddly heavy-handed in an otherwise finely wrought novel.
Such passages, combined with a decidedly simplistic rendering of politics in the Middle East, bog down Mr. Bromell's narrative and distract attention from his ability to create characters who engage our sympathy and our imagination.
In some passages, extension is characterized as a matter of simply preserving or not losing what is given to one at birth (4B12, 4B19, 4B28, 6A10, 6A11), and such passages accord with the water metaphor in suggesting that moral development happens in the absence of abnormal interference.
Such passages are written with a pen of iron dipped in Old Testament ink, and they trace out a cosmic baroque.
Several such passages - turned into verse with minimal changes - also find their way into some of his most memorable war poems, such as Died of Wounds.
