Viewers are drawn into an active, immersive experience watching the series. They come away with the feeling that poetry is in them.
Arts Commentary: Separating the Maker from the Made, the Doer from the Doing
It is natural to believe that there is (or should be) a close connection between the personality and the work.
Book Review: “Home Reading Service” — Beyond Empty Words
In Home Reading Service the literary and the illiterate rub shoulders, and we are given a vision of people tentatively emerging from behind walls.
Film Review: “Belle” — “Gales of song, guide me through the storm”
Belle didn’t quite make my heart sing, but it’s a nice change of pace to see a film that treats the internet as a place that can bring people together, not merely a cut-throat Thunder Dome of clashing egos and verbal slap fights.
Short Fuse Podcast #49: “Race for Tomorrow” — On the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis
Host Elizabeth Howard and journalist Simon Mundy talk about his book “Race for Tomorrow,” which examines the implications of climate change, from the micro to the macro.
Opera Album Review: A Scandalous Liaison Makes a Wonderful Opera: Lennox Berkeley’s “Nelson”
Berkeley’s Nelson reinforces my sense that many fine composers of the twentieth century have largely slid off the map because they did not cater to the obsession of many critics and academics with “the New at all cost.”
Book Review: “Through a Screen Darkly” — Psychological Strategies for Moving Beyond the Pandemic
I found Through a Screen Darkly to be as enlightening as it is useful: we don’t just read about and invest our emotions in other lives; we learn what to do about our own.
Film Review: “The Lost Daughter” — Surviving Womanhood
Beyond its engaging plot and the tour de force performances by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter is a gorgeous and sure-handed work of cinema.
Classical Music Album Review: Boston Modern Orchestra Project plays John Harbison
A surprisingly moving collection, all of it mightily played and sung by musicians who clearly intuit John Harbison’s musical language.
Poetry Review: The Word-Whipped Verse of “Flame in a Stable”
Flame in a Stable admits the reader into the committed life of a literate, far-reaching, colloquial, passionate, playful, and witty poetic voice,