Attached to the notion that all places are stories and all stories places, Mason, at his best, draws an illuminating...
A combination of penetrating considerations of renowned and out-of-fashion poets and keen appreciations of the interplay of landscape and culture.
Poet and novelist Mason (English/Colorado Coll.; Sea Salt, 2014, etc.), who served as the poet laureate of Colorado from 2010 to 2014, avoids an excess of academic jargon in favor of a straightforward style, though occasionally his descriptions lean toward the overwrought and there is a tendency, largely understandable, to worship at the altar of poetry a little too devoutly. The strengths of this collection are the author’s closely reasoned essays and expansive book reviews. Apart from a reminiscence of his years in Greece, which generates thoughtful appreciations of the writers Patrick Leigh Fermor (“a life of inspired insouciance”) and Bruce Chatwin, Mason explores the work of a wide range of literary artists. The best of these approach such notables as W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, and Robinson Jeffers with fresh eyes and bracing prose. At times, Mason mounts a rigorous defense of the artist in question; at others, he offers cleareyed, warts-and-all analyses. Early on he also recalls the interesting story of how The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was rescued by a philologist in a remainder bin in 1861 and the process by which it was published and disseminated and became a sensation. Clearly, reading (and writing) is a form of travel and transcendence for the author, who conveys this feeling in erudite, often intoxicating language—though he does get rather inebriated himself from time to time. Mason wears his liberalism prominently, which is fine when not walking the precipice of preachiness, as he sometimes does, but it is hard to dispute his melancholy assessment that “history can seem a bombardment of human stupidities.”
Attached to the notion that all places are stories and all stories places, Mason, at his best, draws an illuminating literary cartography with many fascinating ports of call.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58988-123-5
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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