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THE WORLD'S WIFE

Name: THE WORLD'S WIFE
Author: Carol Ann Duffy
ISBN: 0-571-19985-2

by Carol Ann Duffy ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2000

For lovers of myth, or just a good tell, this dark and darkly comic volume has much to offer.

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In her fifth volume of poetry, British poet Duffy presents to us the world of the liminal wife. Here we do not find annals of Victoria or Medea or Eleanor Roosevelt, but rather catch an imaginative glimpse into the lives of real and mythic women whose stories were not exactly their own: Mrs. Faust, Queen Herod, and Frau Freud, to name a few. Each of the 30 or so women featured in Duffy’s collection regales us with her side of her famous partner’s story, and the result is often insightful and always entertaining. Duffy’s verse is at once tight and resonant, her language colloquial and engaging, her rhymes refreshing. While a great strength of the volume is its thematic unity, these poems are better swallowed in short snatches, for the tone of the wife’s lament is often so consistent that the uniqueness of each woman’s plight gets debased. For instance, Mrs. Tiresias’s dilemma (“All I know is this: / he went out for his walk a man / and came home female”) differs quite a bit from Eurydice’s discomfort in hell (“the one place you’d think a girl would be safe / from the kind of a man who follows her round / writing poems”), yet they come to us in a strikingly similar voice. Reminiscent of Sexton’s Transformations (1971), these works take the plots of some classic tales and give them a wry, mod twist.

For lovers of myth, or just a good tell, this dark and darkly comic volume has much to offer.

Pub Date: April 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-571-19985-2

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TIME TIDINGS
edited by Carol Ann Duffy

- BOOK REVIEW
STOPPING FOR DEATH
by Carol Ann Duffy & illustrated by Trisha Rafferty

- BOOK REVIEW
I WOULDN'T THANK YOU FOR A VALENTINE
edited by Carol Ann Duffy & illustrated by Trisha Rafferty

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TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

by Ernest Hemingway ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 1937

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A somewhat puzzling book, but — all in all — it is good Hemingway, and a sure sale. Key West and Cuba form the settings for a tough story of men at the end of their tether, grasping at any straw, regardless of risk, to turn a few dollars. Rum-running, smuggling aliens, carrying revolutionary arms. Gangsters, rich sportsmen, sated with routine, dissipated women and men — they are not an incentive to belief in the existence of decent people. But in spite of the hard-boiled, bitter and cruel streak, there is a touch of tenderness, sympathy, humanity. Adventure — somewhat disjointed. The first section seems simply to set the stage — the story starting after the prelude is over. The balance forms a unit, working up to a tragic climax and finale. There is something of The Sun Also Rises,and a Faulkner quality, Faulkner at his best. A book for men — and not for the squeamish. You know your Hemingway market. His first novel in 8 years.

Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1937

ISBN: 0684859238

Page Count: 177

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1937

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LETTERS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
by Ernest Hemingway & edited by Verna Kale ; Sandra Spanier & Miriam B. Mandel

- BOOK REVIEW
DEAR PAPA
by Ernest Hemingway with Patrick Hemingway ; edited by Brendan Hemingway & Stephen Adams

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
by Ernest Hemingway ; edited by Seán Hemingway

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DUMA KEY

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2008

Edgar’s own story in the present is more compelling than the revelations of the key’s past, and the novel might have been...

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The prolific master of psycho-horror returns to the mysteries of the creative process, a subject that has inspired some of his most haunting work.

This could be considered a companion piece to The Shining, offering plenty of reversals on that plot. In both cases, isolation has severe effects on the psyche of an artist, yet where the former novel found its protagonist in a lethal state of writer’s block, the latter sees a one-time building magnate transformed into an impossibly prolific and powerful painter, due to circumstances beyond his control. And where the isolation in the former had a family cut off from society by a frigid northern winter, the setting of the latter is a mysterious Florida key, lush and tropical in its overgrowth, somehow immune to commercial development. A self-made millionaire, Edgar Freemantle narrates the novel in a conversational, matter-of-fact tone. He explains how a job-site accident cost him his arm, his sanity (during the early part of an extended recuperation) and his wife (whom he had physically threatened after the accident transformed him into something other than himself). What he gained was a seemingly inexplicable command as a visual artist, particularly after his recuperation (from both his accident and his marriage) takes him to the isolated Duma Key, where the only other inhabitants are an elderly, wealthy woman and her caretaker. It seems that all three have suffered severe traumas that bond them and that perhaps have even drawn them together. Soon Edgar discovers that his art has given him the power not only to predict the future, but to transform it. He ultimately pays a steep price for his artistic gifts, particularly as his investigation of the mysteries of Duma Key lead him to discover the tragic origins of his artistic vision.

Edgar’s own story in the present is more compelling than the revelations of the key’s past, and the novel might have been twice as powerful if it had been cut by a third, but King fans will find it engrossing.