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
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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
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