A monumental history of English-language poetry, told through the lives and works of its most important practitioners by the editor of PN Review, a director of Carcanet Press. Schmidt, not an academic but one of most significant publishers of verse in England, brings a fresh perspective to the history of English verse, and he casts his net refreshingly wide, including such outlanders as Derek Walcott and other Anglo-Caribbean writers, Irish and Australian poets, as well as early balladeers, among others (but without stooping to include rock songwriters and rappers). He also invokes the rocky history of poetry publishing and printing in telling ways, allowing readers to see the pivotal role played by the likes of William Caxton. From the book’s outset, he makes a case for the act of reading poetry, too: “I prefer to be unlicensed, to read a poem, not a text.” As a critic, he is incisive and deadly honest, describing early English writer Richard Rolle as “such a bad poet” and offering candid assessments of great unread classics like “The Bruce” or of perpetually controversial poets like Byron (“there is a tawdry excess in much of Byron, a satirist’s knack of simplifying for effect, but only sporadic satirical consistency”). Perhaps it’s to his advantage that he is not himself a poet. His language is fresh and relatively unfettered, his readings of the poets under consideration unhackneyed. Thus, Gower’s allegory is the “kind of poem [that] is insulated against real weather,” and Dunbar is “courtier and friar in one.” Still, this is not a book to be read from cover to cover in a sitting (or many sittings). The essays stand alone well enough to encourage readers to dip in at random, although Schmidt’s argument—for an inclusive and variegated “English” verse—is developed coherently and at length. Monumental, yes, but seldom dull.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40624-7
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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