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REPAIR

Name: REPAIR
Author: C.K. Williams
ISBN: 0-374-24932-6

by C.K. Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1999

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The much-celebrated Princeton professor (whose honors include an NBCC award) provides in this, his eight book of verse, a wishful definition of his art: a poet is ’someone who lives in words, making a world from their music.” Elsewhere, he reveals his dissatisfaction with language when sculpting with wax, ’something real,” “instead of words.” Such confusion about his work results partly from Williams’s clumsy style—he’s made the extra-long-line his trademark, but his pronouns often lose their referent as a result; his stale and undistinguished vocabulary is propped up by a preponderance of adverbs; and his flat and wordy lines derive their only rhythms from the pointless repetition of phrases. The author sticks with the driving themes of his previous volumes: the struggle between “consciousness” (a word he uses way too often) and being in the moment; between love and despair; between the heart and the mind—though neither of these fares well. Williams’s testaments to love are cloying at best: in a poem to his newborn grandson, he enters the child’s “consciousness” and is overwhelmed by ’such love—; in “Depths,” a childhood fear anticipates the poet’s fear of never having found his true “love—; and “Lost Wax” answers its own question——What make you whole?” [sic] with “Love. My love.” Williams’s long, touchy-feely personal narratives are particularly limp: “The Poet” profiles a self-styled poet from the “years of hippiedom” who scares the guilt-ridden Williams; and “King——a knee-jerk narrative about crying at a Martin Luther King memorial—is a self-serving gush about feeling his “black friend’s” pain. Williams should stick to poems like “Invisible Mending,” a lovely portrait of three seamstresses working in a storefront window, seen as angels of “forgiveness and repair.” It’s hard to find a whole lot to enjoy in a poet who moans: “The agonizing plasma consciousness can be.”

Pub Date: June 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-374-24932-6

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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OWEN FOOTE, MONEY MAN

by Stephanie Greene & illustrated by Martha Weston ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2000

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In his quest for easy moolah, Owen learns that the road to financial solvency can be rocky and fraught with work. Greene (Owen Foote, Soccer Star, 1998, etc.) touches upon the often-thorny issue of chores and allowances: Owen’s mom wants him to help out because he’s part of the family and not just for the money—while Owen wants the money without having to do tedious household chores. This universal dilemma leaves Owen without funds and eagerly searching for ways to make a quick buck. His madcap schemes range from original—a “free” toilet demonstration that costs 50 cents—to disastrous, as during the trial run of his children’s fishing video, Owen ends up hooking his ear instead of a trout. Enlisting the aid of his stalwart, if long-suffering, friend Joseph, the two form a dog-walking club that becomes vastly restricted in clientele after Owen has a close encounter with an incontinent, octogenarian canine. Ultimately, Owen learns a valuable lesson about work and money when an unselfish action is generously rewarded. These sudden riches motivate Owen to consider wiser investments for his money than plastic vomit. Greene’s crisp writing style and wry humor is on-target for young readers. Brief chapters revolving around a significant event or action and fast pacing are an effective draw for tentative readers. Weston’s (Space Guys!, p. 392, etc.) black-and-white illustrations, ranging in size from quarter- to full-page, deftly portray Owen’s humorous escapades. A wise, witty addition to Greene’s successful series. (Fiction. 8-10)

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2000

ISBN: 0-618-02369-0

Page Count: 96

Publisher: Clarion Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE SHINING

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 1976

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A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).

The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....

Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.