A collection that delivers a pleasant and appreciative, if slightly uneven, poetic take on nature themes.
Ireland presents a poetry book that celebrates the outdoors and offers ruminative reflections on life.
The poet opens with “In the Woods,” about a forest walk with “summer overhead” and “autumn underfoot,” in which the speaker considers how they are “Just kicking death around / While I am lost in life.” He waxes poetic about Appalachia in “Dead in the Water”: “With its hills like swells, / And its breezes like the sound / Heard on shores and shells.” Ireland observantly documents in “Two Trees” how a “fragile white-haired lady” stares at her discarded Christmas tree from indoors, “Her window like a mirror in between.” The speaker in “Dark Place” tries to cure their “dark propensity to go / From high to low” by venturing outside, while in “Private Road,”the speaker laments how housing development changes the landscape, noting, “we used to have the mountain to ourselves”; two pages later, in “Mountain Development,” the speaker mourns that “Soon signs will forbid / And a gate will block / The pleasure of / Our evening walk.” A few works take darker turns, such as “Creek Rock” and “Roadside Example,” which comment on horrific antigay violence. However, Ireland’s affinity for the outdoors is most evident in this collection; his descriptions are visceral and evocative, as when noting “dead leaves, // Deep as a shag rug” (“In the Woods”) or the “firefly-dotted dark” (“Private Road”). His rhyme schemes and use of perspective are playful in lines such as “Five deer were gathered for a private meeting / This evening at the bottom of the lawn. / I opened the back door and yelled a greeting: / The buck let out a snort, and all were gone” (“Private Meeting”). However, a handful of political poems feel ill-fitting, such as “Sunday-Morning Quarterback,” which recalls CBS News Sunday Morning’s stories on the Vietnam War in the 1980s, evoking “the President—the fat-faced Godfather— / Embattled but safe at home, defending the whole endeavor.”
A collection that delivers a pleasant and appreciative, if slightly uneven, poetic take on nature themes.Pub Date: July 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781625494658
Page Count: 86
Publisher: David Robert Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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