JIM BECKERMAN The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 02-12-2006 Divine comedy -- Move over, Darwin. Flying Spaghetti Monster Is here to explain everything JIM BECKERMAN Date: 02-12-2006, Sunday Section: LIVING Edtion: All Editions Unlike a certain other religion in the news, the...

THE INVESTMENT COLUMN Share price : 1,156p (+33p) Our view : Hold Some years ago, National Express was lampooned by a band called The Divine Comedy, who advised: "Take the National Express when you're life's in a mess..." The company...

Rodin's The Thinker has sat at the entrance to the Detroit Institute of Arts for decades, welcoming generations of visitors to one of the nation's largest fine arts museums.Now, for the first time since acquiring it in 1922, the DIA is loaning out the iconic...

Roberto Benigni was reciting a page from Dante's poem on love and the afterlife when he thought hell had come to Earth.Shots rang out Tuesday night as the Oscar-winning actor-director was performing in a piazza in the southern Italian city of Cosenza, police said.Upon hearing...

Divine Comedies is the watershed book of James Merrill's life as a poet. Characterized by resolution and reconciliation and by Proustian recall, it is his most important book. It displays Merrill at the peak of his lyrical and narrative powers; but it's a dense, strenuous book…. At the same time it is innocent of the charge of hermeticism, as his last two volumes were not. Difficult of access as these poems are, only a page or so is downright impossible; and for the first time Merrill h...

[Divine Comedies: Poems] is a verse not orphaned but fully parented in the flesh and the spirit, suckled, if not by Woolf, by a crowd of others. Yeats and Stevens, Kafka, Proust, Auden, Izak Dinesen, Brünnhilde, Tadzio, Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag—past presences, real and fictional, pervade [Merrill's] poetry. Highly seasoned and anything but anonymous, it is in some important sense serene, with the serenity of those who can still experience history, personal and public, as properly occasioni...

In [Divine Comedies], where most of the poems have a narrative emphasis, Merrill succeeds in expressing his sensibility in a style deliberately invoking Scheherazade's tireless skein of talk…. His narrative forms in verse allow Merrill the waywardness, the distractions, the eddies of thought impossible in legends or in the spare nouveau roman, and enable the creation of both the long tale and of a new sort of lyric, triumphantly present here in two faultless poems, sure to be anthologized, &#x...