Tasty literary assessments served with a dollop of gossip.
A noted poet opines on other writers.
In this collection, award-winning poet Kleinzahler (The Hotel Oneira, 2013, etc.) gathers reviews, essays, and remembrances. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and a few of these biting and sharp sallies take their subjects and reputations to task. He admires Robert Lowell’s “enormous gift,” but his prestige is “much diminished” and his influence “has been baneful.” E.e. cummings is the “sort of poet one loves at the age of seventeen and finds unbearably mawkish and vacuous as an adult.” Richard Brautigan had a “lightness of touch [and] gorgeous timing," but “he wasn’t really very good….[I]t is pretty thin stuff: precious, self-indulgent fluff.” Kleinzahler can zero in on a work or writer like an eagle diving after its prey and snatch. The “clotted syntax” of John Berryman’s “much admired and little read” Homage to Mistress Bradstreet won’t let the piece breathe: “One feels the strain in its assemblage.” Kleinzahler likes to rescue lesser-known writers from obscurity. Lucia Berlin’s stories are of “a very high order and not always easy to take,” and the author also resuscitates poets Christopher Middleton, Roy Fisher, and Lorine Niedecke, “one of the most important and original poets of this past century. Kleinzahler much admires the poet Louis Zukofsky, a fine translator and author of the puzzling book-long poem “A,” which is “an unholy mess, an extraordinarily complex, often brilliant and heroic mess, but a mess.” There are affectionate portraits of two poets who influenced the author greatly: Thom Gunn, “one of the most important poets in the English language,” and the “shockingly neglected” Basil Bunting. Others discussed include Allen Ginsberg, James Schuyler, Leonard Michaels, and James Merrill. Kleinzahler also tosses in some personal pieces about music (and having too many CDs) and two hometowns, San Francisco and Fort Lee, New Jersey.
Tasty literary assessments served with a dollop of gossip.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28209-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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