This compelling study deftly blends personal details with consideration of the poet’s craft.
A major poet of the 20th century receives her first biography.
One of a mere handful of women to appear in Donald Allen’s anthology, New American Poetry, 1945-1960, Denise Levertov (1923–1997) remains an influential and controversial figure in American poetry, both for her art and her politics. While perhaps less well-known than her confessional female contemporaries Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Levertov pursued a variety of techniques over the span of five decades, alternately crafting lyrical love poems, anti-war diatribes and spiritual odes. Her 1948 arrival in the United States from her native England heralded a major breakthrough, as she received the support of established poets like William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan. Although American poetry operated as a sort of boys’ club at that time, Levertov earned a hard-won place in the journals, anthologies and publishing houses that brought her to prominence. Greene (Dean Emerita/Oxford College of Emory Univ.; The Living of Maisie Ward, 1997, etc.) shows, however, that personal relationships often fractured under the intensity of Levertov’s personality. Her 25-year correspondence with Duncan ended on a sour note when he claimed that her vehement protest against the Vietnam War was making her poetry shrill and didactic. When that war, along with Levertov’s unhappy marriage, finally ended in 1975, she began writing more contemplative poems that engaged with the natural world as well as with the divine mystery that had imbued her childhood. Influenced by her father's Hasidic Judaism and his conversion to Christianity, Levertov had always felt a dual spiritual-sensual connection with her environment. While her emotional life continued to be tumultuous up until her death, her poems gradually gained the mastery that her earliest work had prophesied.
This compelling study deftly blends personal details with consideration of the poet’s craft.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-252-03710-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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