Sharp writing and keen imagery underscore poetic themes of love and loss, memory and regret.
A writer grieves the loss of his wife to an aggressive form of cancer in this collection of poetry.
In a concise introduction, Flanigan connects this noteworthy volume’s title to the first 15 poems, each of which features a candle printed above it that would be extinguished one by one during the traditional ceremony. He explains: “The structure, mood, and dramatic progression of this ancient ritual seemed to perfectly suit my mournful purpose.” The first offering, “Sonora,” is an impressive work that creatively paints a vivid desert landscape: “Roadrunners like wicked witches arrogantly prancing.” It also sets the stage for what is to follow. With the benefit of hindsight, the author realizes that this memory from the couple’s early days suggests a youthful disregard for mortality. Upon closer inspection, danger lurks beneath the surface, represented by a hawk stalking desert creatures: “Stopping every few yards and glancing sharply to the sky / From which Death swoops down and strikes low. / We did not know then what we do know now— / You are, you become, then are no more.” Most of the poems feature free verse while three longer works appear as prose poems and deftly use the second person as Flanigan directly addresses his wife. With a journallike feel, these denser texts present a timeline as readers learn the details of his wife’s battles with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. In addition to self-recrimination, the author makes the physical and emotional tolls of the disease palpable, recounting her decline, her last words, and her death. Curiously, one of these longer works, “A Trip to the Underworld,” breaks out of the prose format and ends with a traditional rhyme scheme. Similarly, the 15th poem, “Strepitus: Like a Fallen Empire,” presents a rhyming pattern and a heart-wrenching finality: “Yes, may we take solace in the certainty of our defeat, / We gave it almost all that it was due, / We were braver than we knew.” The remaining 10 pieces include visions of older relatives and a poignant moment shared by father and daughter. One of the standouts here is a moving tribute to Flanigan’s grandmother, “The Irish in America: Annie D.” Despite all of the challenges she confronted, the author’s “Nana” was the best he could have asked for in the face of uneven parenting.
Sharp writing and keen imagery underscore poetic themes of love and loss, memory and regret.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73361-032-2
Page Count: 76
Publisher: Arjuna Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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