A bit too derivative and personal, but blessed with some deserving gems.
A collection of short, lyrical free verse that celebrates the timeless mysteries of love.
Belying the martial connotations of its title, this volume of poetry conjures a world where love is neither a battlefield nor a struggle of wills, but instead a prolonged and enjoyable pursuit. Sappho's take on "Ode on a Grecian Urn" perhaps. The drums of war do beat, but the battle must be fought by lovers united in the name of social justice, answering the poet's challenge in the imperative-driven "Legalize Love"–"Don't tell me about the things you cannot accept / Tell me about the things you are going to change." However, the collection is generally more personal than political, more a celebration of intense connection than a call to arms. While the poems run the gamut of themes and moods, the opening piece, "Be My Goddess," nicely encapsulates the major movements and modes of the volume. Against a backdrop of mythic and mystical imagery woven together with serial similes, the narrator tracks her lover across continents, oceans and centuries, sometimes battered but more often seemingly as fulfilled by the quest as she might be by eventual union. Given its length and density, "Be My Goddess" is a surprising success given that White's strongest poetic voice breaks through in her more active, playful, yet controlled poems like "I Lived and Loved," where heavy beats, syncopation and internal rhyme drive the verses forward. On the other hand, her pieces that strive for more linear narration, such as "Tell me a Love story with a Happy Ending," come across as relatively flat prose. White's ear and eye for others' poetry–echoing Rumi and Omar Khayyam in much of her imagery, clearly channeling Mary Oliver's attention to the smallest mysteries of nature in "Every Snail Tells the Story" and sounding positively Whitmanesque in "The Women's Music Festival"–ultimately proves a curse in that her authentic voice often gets lost in the homage. A shame since her voice, when she finds it, is a powerful one.
A bit too derivative and personal, but blessed with some deserving gems.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-0417-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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