Song of a Reformed Headhunter

SHIO KUSAKA I loved the show of Richard Serra's early work at David Zwirner. It is full of feeling for material, volume and balance, the hallmarks of his mature achievements. My favorite work at the show was a lead plate made in the form of a canvas sheet that has been folded into four quarters and then unfolded. On the second floor were Blinky Palermo's works on paper, which he did near the end of his all-too-short life. Many of the drawings were composed in series, a feature that emphasizes his constant experimentation with color, geometric shapes and brushstroke. Even though they allude so familiarly to abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptual art, they retain an irresistible freshness. Anselm Kiefer's Morgenthau Plan at Gagosian was a very different kind of show. Monumental, serious, intense, the paintings, which cover completely with thick impasto the blown-up photographs of fields of flowers, brood on the-then US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau's p...

TLS July 1 2011 from Robert Wells's review of Complete Poetry, Translations, and Selected Prose , by Bernard Spencer, edited by Peter Robinson: In his story ["Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"] Kipling links Punch's loss with a precocious compensatory passion for language. Spencer remarks on a similar preoccupation in himself: "I used to pray that I should be a traveller abroad when I grew up, just as I used to pray that I should be a poet". For him the two wishes are inseparable, committing him to a quest for a reality to replace the one taken from him. "The poet's immoderate, promiscuous love" has its origin in an immense deprivation. * Spencer died in an accident at the age of fifty-three. The accident was unforeseeable, yet in the later poems there are many such presentiments that a denouement was near. Spencer vanished one evening from the clinic in Vienna to which, in a state of delirium, he had been admitted after the sudden worsening of an...