Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Deb Thorton's essay

Many thanks to Deb Thornton for allowing me to use her essay "Blood" in the previous post.

I like it for several reasons.  Especially in the way she switches smoothly and swiftly from the concrete and the immediate to the abstract and the eternal - smoothly, but with jarring effect.  The essay is beautifully written, and it's also troubling in the best sense.  It makes the reader look anew at the connections of things.

A couple of other aspects of it I can only envy.  One is her usage of nature as images for human and spiritual considerations.  I can't pull that off without it sounding forced or pretentious.

The other is her ability to cover a lot of ideas and images in a few words - with with her sentences of semi-Faulknerian length!  Brevity has never been one of my gifts.

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