The best of Selby’s verses sing, loud and off-key perhaps, but too soulfully not to tap your toes and snap your fingers.
High-spirited and wide-ranging free verse steeped heavily in jazz beats and the Beats’ jazz.
Selby clearly grew up grooving to the poetic beats of Ferlinghetti, Corso and Ginsberg; rhythms internalized and reverberated right into the 21st century in this collection. Like his teachers, Selby finds inspiration, structure and theme in jazz, drink, women and the promise, and failure, of democracy. At their most frenetic, his narrators mimic the joyous skips and tumbles of jazz itself: “Bu- Bu - Bam! / Tink! / tink-tink! / A pillow moan / a Schoenberg tone / a split-down-the-middle / hambone.” At other times, particularly when the theme of the sad inevitability of lonely couplings arises, his narrators croon with a Hank Williams twang: “So one wine colored night / we happen to each other — / me sitting beer dazed and garrulous / on a bar stool / she sporting callisthenic garb / a new coiffure and ten extra pounds.” Ultimately, sound is what these poems are about. Though he may lapse into occasional pedantic and philosophic reveries, Selby mostly wants to bounce words together and see what tone they strike. This is the joy that encourages him to begin “Nursery Rime” with “Hey diddle diddle / diddleo / the cat strums a fiddle / pizzacatio” and to describe the moon as “a cup / filling up / She’s a bowl / receiving souls,” which is not to suggest mindless wordplay. Selby’s narrators struggle mightily to live in the moment, all the while obsessing about the inability to hold onto that moment once the next arrives. And Selby’s poetry certainly invites deeper analysis. The world evoked is a curiously gynocentric, Freudian treasure house, watched over by simultaneously sexualized and maternalized moons, crisscrossed with tunnels, breasts and wombs and populated by regressive men and a dearth of phallic objects. Any analysis, however, is likely to be met by the objections of Selby’s pastoral peasant poet protagonist, cousin Josh: “Boy, you tryin’ to make sense o’ my poems? / Don’t you know? / Or haven’t you heard? / My verse is faster than the speed of logic!”
The best of Selby’s verses sing, loud and off-key perhaps, but too soulfully not to tap your toes and snap your fingers.Pub Date: April 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1434364876
Page Count: 168
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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