A gently told memoir of an elusive poet and a mysterious friendship.
The tale of the author’s discovery of a compelling “minor poet” in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
In the early 1990s, novelist Towler (Writing/Southern New Hampshire Univ.; Island Light, 2010, etc.) moved to Portsmouth, where her husband had taken a position as a psychologist. At first, she was surprised to find herself in a place whose conservative politics felt alien to her and where unannounced visits by neighbors were a common occurrence. Having moved 20 times along the East Coast, with “a vaguely articulated notion that staying in one place too long” would undermine her ability to gather observations for her first novel, she worried about settling down. In Portsmouth, though, the author found inspiration for several novels and, now, a closely observed memoir of her ultimately inscrutable friendship with Robert Dunn, whose aspirations to be a “minor poet” were as intense as Towler’s desire to become a major novelist. “Minor poets have more fun,” Dunn declared. “There is no joy in the struggle for recognition, for money and fame and all they entail,” the author came to realize, “but there is a joy in the thing itself, the making of the poems.” Despite Dunn’s overt satisfaction with his life, Towler often imagined negativity for which there seemed to be no evidence. Celebrated as the poet laureate of Portsmouth, Dunn was pleased to offer readings and appear at events, a response that surprises Towler. She imagined that he found meetings of the Poet Laureate Program dull and tedious, when in fact, he seemed to enjoy them. She imagined that he was annoyed at her “frantic anxiety” over her “craving for recognition,” seeing in his eyes “a hint of accusation” that he did not articulate. As Dunn aged and was beset by illness, he came to rely on Towler for errands and support, a dependency that often puzzled her and is likely to puzzle readers.
A gently told memoir of an elusive poet and a mysterious friendship.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-712-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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