A stunning, fertile selection of poems worthy of the broadest possible audience.
Duncan’s debut collection of introspective poems plaits together pain, love, truth and self-discovery.
The author begins her magnificent collection with the simple premise of knowing oneself. Taken together, the poems chart her journey from suffering heartbreak to embracing life. Shards of a shattering loss shimmer from page to page, and Duncan examines them piece by piece, with her reinvention of herself hiding between the lines. Symbolism lends depth in “Small Waters,” in which the poet describes longing as droplets: “But if / you chance to listen to the sigh / of each tear as it curls around stone, / you may feel a thirst that fills you / and wets your carved cheek.” Her words document both pain and joy, and her poems document a journey of self-integration and change; even a poem about emerging from painshouts with triumph. Duncan speaks of love in words reminiscent of the Bible’s Song of Solomon in “Please Hold My Hand”: “Neither your vessel nor mine will last / forever; each with its cracks will finally / break. Soon enough we will fall into / another season of beauty. So for now, / please hold my hand. Let us drink wine / and sing love songs to one another.” After these intimate explorations, the collection ruminates on larger, more ephemeral issues, such as universal oneness and humans’ connection to nature. In these areas, the poet becomes less tangible and more airy, but the rich, vibrant language evokes moonlit incantations and meditations in the open air. In one gorgeous line from “Grace,” for example, Duncan sums up the life of the artist: “I have only words to express my restless heart, / only a few clear notes that ring inside my busy head.”
A stunning, fertile selection of poems worthy of the broadest possible audience.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4929-2265-0
Page Count: 118
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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