Went to “The Waste Land” last night
Fiona Shaw’s one-woman show
in a derelict theater
on West 42nd Street it was
the first poem of the 20th century
in which bad sex is a metaphor
for the failure of civilization
which is searching for a place
by a placid lake where it can have
a nervous breakdown in peace and quiet
the first poem of the 20th century
to resemble a crossword puzzle
the clues in the form of fragments
phantom quotations and the image
of Eliot in a bedroom with a monastic bed
and a single unadorned light bulb
in the ceiling he was the straightest-
looking poet of the 20th century
with a superb cover, a banker’s
three-piece suit, but he was as crazy
as the rest of us, with rats and bones
and dry rocks rattling around his brain
and a drowned sailor’s swollen eyeballs
-- David Lehman (in The Daily Mirror)
