balefulness

The result amplifies the balefulness of the nihilistic anti-Semite of the title (played by Owen Teale, Broadway's recent Tony-winning Torvald from "A Doll's House"), a dead-eyed cynic who implodes into himself while the sniping and small-mindedness of rural Russia ca.

Wigbealu suggests something tainted in that "balefulness" and "affliction" in Beowulf usually await or need remedy (as the Danes await some remedy in the Grendel case).

What he understands deeply as well as clinically is pain and mortality, the validating elements of his balefulness. The only other stories as intense as the military ones are a close account of a woman's struggle with a particularly rapid form of cancer, a kind of Tet offensive within the body, and of an American advertising man undergoing an "epileptic fugue" of amnesia on a fetid beach in Bombay, whose "loathing for everything on the face of the earth, including himself," is lifted by a local physician whom he gets to save a dying horse.

Auden said of Yeats, "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry"; the Vietnam War hurt Bly into writing the kind of poetry he had been calling for and that in places matched Neruda's in its creeping balefulness. Evoking the fallout of evil that has settled in Minnesota, he ends: