A warm, well-considered celebration of a rich literary form.
An invitation to the “quiet discipline of poetry.”
Poet, teacher, and novelist Leithauser, hoping to inspire his contemporaries to read more poetry, aims his thoughtful overview of prosody at general readers who may feel trepidation when encountering a poem. Unlike scholarly books that focus mostly on what a poem says, Leithauser is equally concerned with how a poem conveys meaning: the building blocks that make for its particular architecture. For readers’ edification, he appends to his analyses a glossary that defines many of the technical terms that he uses, from accentual-syllabic meter to trochee and anapest. Moreover, as examples of poetic forms and language, he includes children’s verse, light verse by writers such as Ogden Nash, and songs by pop lyricists such as Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim, which he thinks will resonate with a broad readership. Still, Leithauser’s close readings assume a fairly sophisticated familiarity with canonical poets and poetic styles. He considers in separate chapters basic forms and attributes of poetry—stanzas, enjambment, iambic pentameter and tetrameter—and rhymes: exact, unexpected, surprising, and the variation known as “rim rhyme,” “where consonants are held steady while internal vowels are shifted.” That type of rhyme, he notes, “opens to the poet a playground for fresh recreation.” Among a wide range of examples, Leithauser includes many of his favorite poets and specific poems. Including Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song,” Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” and Amy Clampitt’s “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews,” these personal connections give the volume a welcome intimacy. Poetry, Leithauser advises, requires readers to slow down, preferably to read aloud, and to be open to the idea that poems “frequently urge a change of life.” In contrast to W.H. Auden’s declaration that poetry “makes nothing happen,” Leithauser counters that poetry “insists that we read and reread and reeducate ourselves” in order to test our values and reset our moral compass.
A warm, well-considered celebration of a rich literary form.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-65505-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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