by intellectual rigor and haunting imagery.
Michaels, whose first novel (Fugitive Pieces, 1997) was published to considerable literary acclaim, couples profound intellect
with deeply felt emotion in a volume that includes two award-winning collections of poems previously published only in Canada (The Weight of Oranges, 1986; and Miners Pond, 1991), along with new work, Skin Divers. The earlier volume is more personal than the rest of the book: While its poems show less finesse in the author’s overuse of clich‚d imagery like bones and stones, they set forth the themes of time, memory, and loss that continue to obsess Michaels in her later poems. If, for the Michaels of The Weight of Oranges, "Memory wraps us / like the shell wraps the sea," by the time of Miner’s Pond memory requires form. In the near-monumental "What The Light Teaches," Michaels states what may be the whole volume’s central thesis: "Language remembers." What distinguishes the author and raises her above many of her peers is the way her personal life informs but never overwhelms her poems, while her intellectual ardor for language and formal thought only occasionally distances her (and the reader) from feeling. As she says in "Words For The Body," one of many of her poems in which art embraces human experience, "No words mean as much as life." These are ambitious poems, often narrative, often in the voice of others, often written to an absent "you." They are almost all love poems, and the love expressed—whether for lover, friend, sibling, parent, or child—is unabashedly passionate and ultimately optimistic. Michaels is wrestling with the way that love survives despite separation, even death. There may be loss and longing but never diminishment of love. With the exception of some narratives that flatten into literalness: a volume of intensely felt emotional truth, strengthened
by intellectual rigor and haunting imagery.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40140-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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