A poetic memoir filled with unexpected but ultimately confusing recollections of spiritual encounters.
A debut memoir combining essays and poetry that recounts a writer’s spiritual evolution and the remarkable visions that inspired it.
“I was certain that something otherworldly was occurring,” Jean writes of the moment that she saw small circles appear on her hands and felt the pain of nails coming through her palms. For her, this experience marked a turning point in her “faith journey,” as it was the first time, she says, that she experienced something supernatural—but it wouldn’t be the last. In poems and autobiographical essays, Jean connects various biblical quotations to major events of her life, including the death of her mother. After moving to Philadelphia for a new job sometime in the 1980s, Jean met her husband, Charles, and gave birth to three sons, but her life was still far from perfect; she began experiencing severe medical problems that she initially believed were due to multiple sclerosis, but proved difficult for doctors to diagnose. After the family’s move to Charlotte, North Carolina, Jean’s concentration on her Christian faith intensified, and she says that she began to see Jesus and speak with him, and even began to receive visions of heaven on Earth. These incidents eventually led to her son taking her to a hospital, but afterward, her mind continued to churn: “I sat at home talking to Jesus in my head, seeing him in my dreams, and understanding Scripture as if Heaven was flowing right through the Bible and talking to me.” In this memoir, Jean’s shifts between prose and poetry produce some startling results. At times, her writing is clear and straightforward, as in a traditional autobiography, but then suddenly she describes strange occurrences, as when she tells of feeling a “swarm of locusts blanket my body and start to eat away at my flesh.” She also presents poems in a variety of different formats, with stanzas that break into pyramidlike shapes and columns, sometimes accompanied by soft drawings. The result is often intriguing, but at times hard to follow. Overall, the earnest descriptions of supernatural events feel untethered to reality, which may make it difficult for readers to connect to them.
A poetic memoir filled with unexpected but ultimately confusing recollections of spiritual encounters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73404-301-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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