A learned but knotty defense on poetry's behalf, persuasive to no one but those who need no convincing.
Poetry doesn't want to be your friend. Get over it.
For poet (Mean Free Path, 2012, etc.), novelist (10:04, 2014, etc.), and MacArthur Fellow Lerner (English/Brooklyn Coll.), the only kind of love poetry permits is tough love. It's an art with a mean streak, or at least a highly forbidding, unlikable temper. It may be a lot of things—melodic, perceptive, brilliant, awful—but it also carries a threat that warns you to either tread slowly or stay away altogether. "I, too, dislike it," Marianne Moore famously wrote; Lerner adds that dislike is part of the bargain: “What kind of art has as a condition of its possibility a perfect contempt?” The problem seems to be that poetry aims higher than other arts and runs the risk of greater failure. "Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical," writes the author, "the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine." The payoff, if there is one, is in the effort. "The hatred of poetry is internal to the art,” writes Lerner, because it is the task of the poet and poetry reader to use the heat of that hatred to burn the actual off the virtual like fog." The author pays homage to the individual, solitary nature of poetry and its refusal to be tamed or coddled, but he does the act of reading no favors. He makes writing poetry seem like a zero-sum game and reading it like torture. The closer he gets to some usable approach, the more it eludes him. His struggle to give concrete form to an increasingly abstract concept of art is just "form gulping after formlessness," as Wallace Stevens put it.
A learned but knotty defense on poetry's behalf, persuasive to no one but those who need no convincing.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-86547-820-6
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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
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