This compelling study deftly blends personal details with consideration of the poet’s craft.
A major poet of the 20th century receives her first biography.
One of a mere handful of women to appear in Donald Allen’s anthology, New American Poetry, 1945-1960, Denise Levertov (1923–1997) remains an influential and controversial figure in American poetry, both for her art and her politics. While perhaps less well-known than her confessional female contemporaries Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Levertov pursued a variety of techniques over the span of five decades, alternately crafting lyrical love poems, anti-war diatribes and spiritual odes. Her 1948 arrival in the United States from her native England heralded a major breakthrough, as she received the support of established poets like William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan. Although American poetry operated as a sort of boys’ club at that time, Levertov earned a hard-won place in the journals, anthologies and publishing houses that brought her to prominence. Greene (Dean Emerita/Oxford College of Emory Univ.; The Living of Maisie Ward, 1997, etc.) shows, however, that personal relationships often fractured under the intensity of Levertov’s personality. Her 25-year correspondence with Duncan ended on a sour note when he claimed that her vehement protest against the Vietnam War was making her poetry shrill and didactic. When that war, along with Levertov’s unhappy marriage, finally ended in 1975, she began writing more contemplative poems that engaged with the natural world as well as with the divine mystery that had imbued her childhood. Influenced by her father's Hasidic Judaism and his conversion to Christianity, Levertov had always felt a dual spiritual-sensual connection with her environment. While her emotional life continued to be tumultuous up until her death, her poems gradually gained the mastery that her earliest work had prophesied.
This compelling study deftly blends personal details with consideration of the poet’s craft.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-252-03710-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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