An ambitious collection that fails more often than it shines.
The Barnard New Women Poets Prize was awarded to this first collection of enormously imaginative poems written by the winner of a recent fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center and a grant from the Colorado Council on the Arts. From the deceptively simple title (musca domestica is Latin for housefly) to the poems focusing on such philosophically sophisticated subjects as the meaning of meaning, everyday life is presented as we rarely consider it—skewed and in language and syntax designed to please linguists more than ordinary readers. Hume’s titles intrigue: “Lies Concerning Speed,” “Map Drawn from Memory by My Brother,” “Total Things Known about Motion,” “A Million Futures of Late.” At the same time, the poems themselves are puzzles, the best of them in the simultaneous spirits of Wallace Stevens and E.E. Cummings (“Didn’t you see it sky the sum?”), the least simply confusing, as if the speaker were caught in a world in which all images were surreal (“I shuffle layers of pulp / feathering gossip”) and most syntax was arranged as if to duplicate that of a foreign tongue. Some poems contain striking, meaningful ideas or images (“Because the unadorned always subject the adorned to their proofs”; “from a rock jetty / five monks ease their hems / into the river”), but a reader must wade through too much weedy language to reach these few brilliances. In one of the collection’s most successful poems, “Articulate Initials,” Hume fantasizes actual lives within the illustrations surrounding illuminated letters. Here her description remains singularly focused, with the fine result that she reaches unexpected but earned epiphanic conclusions. Too many poems in the book offer only dispersed images and so many of them per poem that any luminosity is diluted.
An ambitious collection that fails more often than it shines.Pub Date: April 21, 2000
ISBN: 0-8070-6859-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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