An illuminating prose album of candid musings on the “melancholy and joyful” gifts of art.
Reflections on art, music, poetry, and family from an acclaimed Polish poet.
In an engaging assemblage of short essays, poems, and diary entries as brief as a sentence or two, Zagajewski (Unseen Hand: Poems, 2011, etc.) offers an impressionistic collection of thoughts about culture, history, and aesthetics, circling always back to his family’s experiences during World War II, when they were forced to leave their native Lvov and resettle in Silesia. Uprootedness, he believes, is crucial to the creation of art. Stability may be enviable, he writes, “but it has no poetic merit whatsoever. Loss alone touches us deeply, permanence goes unremarked.” Many pieces coalesce to form a tender portrait of his taciturn, modest father, an engineer and professor, who lost his memory to dementia. When asked once to comment about “the whole strange world that had swallowed up his son,” he replied that poetry is a “slight exaggeration,” because, as Zagajewski explains, a genre awash in metaphor, hyperbole, and emotion was antithetical to his objective, pragmatic view of the world; poetry “confuses the boundaries and lines of reality, which grows feverish and dances.” The author himself defines poetry as “mysticism for beginners.” Acutely responsive to place, Zagajewski recalls 20 years spent in Paris, a city that enthralled him, and many semesters teaching in Houston, where he discovered the riches of the Rice University library and Menil art collection. Other pieces, not surprisingly, consider language, writing, and a number of fellow poets, including Joseph Brodsky (a “brilliant, arrogant intellectual” and also “the most considerate of friends”), Constantine Cavafy (“the Balzac of modern Greek poetry”), Zbigniew Herbert, and Philip Larkin. Zagajewski dismisses the work of some young poets who, in his estimation, “did not know how to live.” Among visual artists, the author admires the old masters; in music, he is transported by Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Billie Holiday, whose voice rendered him “spellbound.”
An illuminating prose album of candid musings on the “melancholy and joyful” gifts of art.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-26587-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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