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| | The New York Review of Books: KESH & LOANING |
 | | Alvarez is annoyed at the poem's "verbal affectations"—Nerthus, kesh, loaning—in a "poem as brief, unsubstantial, and apparently simple as this." For him the poem's puzzling questions are very nearly beyond all conjecture, and he clearly needs those explicators to clarify them. |
| | Had Alvarez allowed his eye to stray one entry beyond OED's kesh, dialect for kex, an umbelliferous plant, he would have come upon kesh-work with a cross reference to kish, Irish for a wicker basket, and by extension to a causeway built up on wicker baskets of earth or stone, and to a corduroy road. |
| | And, writing about an Irish poet from the North of Ireland, Alvarez ought particularly to be aware of Long Kesh, the notorious prison camp where suspected members of the IRA are held without trial under extremely harsh conditions. |
| www.nybooks.com /articles/7413 (876 words) |
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