From the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk, etc., a mosaic of essays on writers and writing, shimmering here and there with a lovely phrase, a bit of sage advice, but often done in by overwrought imagery and overheated views. "When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe"—so begins the text, revealing at once Dillard's penchant for rhythmic repetition and blunt, down-to-earth, Anglo-Saxon language. She's at her best when she keeps it simple—describing her cluttered desk, her pine study (a prefab toolshed), the time her electric typewriter exploded. The physicality of the writer's life—mounds of paper, "refried coffee"—appeals to her and, through her enthusiasm, to us. Good, too, are the little anecdotes of her daily walks, and of other writers' schedules. On the other hand, only the most placid of readers will fail to fidget during the patches of strangely sloppy prose, including banal observations ("putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating"); suffocating alliteration ("the reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses. . ."); perplexing inaccuracies ("out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year"); and (presumably inadvertent) parodies of Melville ("the page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly. . ."). To top it off, Dillard's technique of juxtaposing apparently disconnected little essay fragments, which in the past has at times led to unexpected richness of insight, in this book leads largely to head-scratching. Happily, Dillard winds up with a graceful essay about a brilliant stunt pilot whose daring twists and rolls provide an apt metaphor for the writing life. This, plus her undeniable authority when discussing the miseries and joys that attend the world of pen and ink, makes this slim volume, if not a triumph, at least worth the read.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1989
ISBN: 0060919884
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
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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