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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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