Moving, poetry-soaked memoirs by poet Nayman of his time with Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (A.A.), whom he met in 1959 when he was 23. He later became her secretary. In 1911, A.A. was a founding member of the Poets Guild, from which grew the Acmeists. Until 1922, as we discover, she managed to publish five books, but in 1921 ex-husband N.S. Gumilyov was executed and a year later A.A. was banned from publishing. Her son was arrested three times, sentenced to death (commuted), then exiled, all to keep her silent. A.A. turned to translation, stopped publishing poetry until her ban was lifted in 1940. Later, she was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union for writing ``ideologically harmful'' private emotions ``totally alien to Soviet literature,'' and her latest book of poetry was destroyed in the presses. To help save her son's life, she unwillingly wrote a cycle of banal poems in praise of Stalin. When Nayman went to A.A.'s house in Leningrad, he met a quiet woman whose ``appearance, words, and gestures all expressed the fact that she was doomed, utterly...I left, stunned by the fact that I had spent an hour in the presence of a person with whom I had no ideas in common...but with whom no one on earth could have anything in common.'' Nayman captures A.A.'s great but reserved spirit largely by repeating her answers to literary questions and responses to poems sent or read to her. By this time, she had a ``phonograph record'' of about three stock replies that sounded thoughtful but said nothing—in her day poets were killed for their poetry. A.A.'s terse poetry is poorly served by Walter Arndt's flowing translations herein, but A.A. comes off majestically anyway. (Eight pages of b&w illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-8050-1408-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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
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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