Collected in this volume are three books, in their entirety, from the middle of a distinguished career—The Freeing of the Dust (1975), Life in the Forest (1978), and Candles in Babylon (1982)—but no “new” or revised material. Levertov (who died in 1997 at the age of 74) wrote poems that are accessible and unadorned, but her straightforwardness does not preclude a profound metaphorical resonance. She was in tune with the natural world and our place in it, as demonstrated in the remarkable, if unlikely, “Pig Dream” sequence (“I love my own Humans and their friends, / but let it be said, / their race is dangerous”). She was also fiercely committed to speaking out against war (Vietnam, especially, in the earlier poems collected here) and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and power plants; hers are among the best poems we have on these subjects. “A Speech: For Antidraft Rally, D.C., March 22, 1980” concludes with what should be a simple admonition: “We must dare to win / not wars, but a future / in which to live.” Levertov took pains to avoid the self-conscious use of the first person, and as a result her vision has a welcome breadth and generosity: despite the often-bleak subject matter, tranquility and strength lie at the core of her best work, offering hope for the future: “You live / this April’s pain / now, / you will come / to other Aprils, / each will astonish you.” In the end, her oeuvre should prove as durable and relevant as the writers (William Carlos Williams, the Black Mountain poets, etc.) with whom she was frequently associated during her lifetime.
An excellent representation of a major poet—for those who don’t already own the books that comprise it.Pub Date: April 24, 2001
ISBN: 0-8112-1469-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
GET IT
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect (1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools country-wide. In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: he murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come. Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
