An emotional, sometimes-wrenching account of how lines of poetry can be lifelines.
A celebrated poet, novelist, memoirist, and editor returns with an account of a life lived to the music of poetry.
Norton executive editor Bialosky (The Players, 2015, etc.) traces her life by discussing poems that are significant to her or that comment in some fashion on life’s various mileposts. Beginning with early childhood and Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” she continues to the present, pausing to focus on specific works and, in some cases, on the lives of poets. Her sections are short and focused—“Discovery,” “Shame,” “Depression,” “Sexuality,” “Ancestors”—and many of the works and poets will be familiar to most readers: Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare, Keats, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens. But Bialosky introduces some artists who are less familiar in the popular culture: Stanley Plumly, Eavan Boland, Adam Zagajewski. The author uses this format to deal with moments of joy, crisis, surprise, and horror in her life, including the dawning awareness of her love for poetry, the death of her father, the ensuing frustrations of her mother, the struggle to find love, her loss of two newborns, and the suicide of her little sister—a loss Bialosky wrote about in History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life (2011). At times, when the poet’s life is especially relevant, she will tell us a bit about that person (Sylvia Plath); at other times, she offers very little biography (Edwin Arlington Robinson). Although her conception and presentation are fresh and original, Bialosky sometimes slips on a cliché lying in her path—e.g., her blood ran cold when she first read Anne Frank; seeing an attractive young man caused her to feel “like a Christmas tree all lit up.” Thankfully, such bumps in the road are infrequent.
An emotional, sometimes-wrenching account of how lines of poetry can be lifelines.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9320-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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