Though often it's true that all our love's in vain. If this seems haughty, it may well be. The title of Burris's Doing Lucretius would seem to promise something daring or even erotic, and in the hands of a fearless and irreverent poet like Maggie Estep, it would have been. Stephen Cushman, a professor at the University of Virginia, prefers his name-dropping to be unabashedly catholic, including figures from history, the arts, science and pop culture. Quite a crowd to fit into one man's Blue Pajamas .
Some readers are impressed.
But then Stuart is, like Dave Smith and Stephen Cushman, another Virginian, and, not incidentally, another name-dropper and stallion of the LSU stable. Nothing more, nothing less. The grandly banal. The grandly banal, indeed. One is struck not only by the dropping of names, but by the A-list conservatism of the names selected for dropping.