This book’s mix of personal text and well-chosen photos will make it a treasure for the author’s family.
Davis’ slim debut collection contains a range of forms—haiku, lyrics, short stories, and memoir.
An author’s note calls this work “an array of glimpses,” and the friends, family, and pets that appear in these pages offer fragments of a full life. Photographs serve to illustrate the poems—a family dog, a family member, a landscape. The personal moments preserved in this book will ensure that it becomes a cherished family archive, but the lack of sustained attention to a particular theme or genre means that it will have less appeal for a general audience. The modest poems don’t reach for insight or prophecy, but they do treat everyday observations with care. Experimentation informs some content, as in the opening series of lettered haiku. After the “I.” poem about imagining (as well as unicorns, Dr. Seuss, and world peace), the “J.” poem, “What Next,” laughs at the folly of the aging self: “I dive in the pool / To retrieve phone and hair piece / Loose shorts fly away.” Such lighthearted play with syllable counts turns more serious in the second major entry, a personal piece of prose titled “Fatherless”: “Another Father’s Day went by yesterday and I’m feeling more fatherless than ever.” Relevant biographical information soon follows: “I am sad and feel kind of empty when I reflect how your life was cancelled by the rest of the family whenever I asked about you. Just because you left, you became a non-person.” Perhaps it takes until adulthood to mourn a “non-person,” especially one whose story has been withheld, as this missive pulses with deep sadness at the father’s long absence. Exploring imagery beyond the formal boundaries of haiku, the author indulges in sensuous fantasy in “One Last Dance”: “A single nymph revolves slowly around a spire. / A lush rainbow of silk / faithfully follows each move / of the soft, marble body.” The dissolution of images, however, makes for the best lines, as it allows a human vulnerability to emerge: “Night falls and beckons the final performance. / My fantasy of Eden dissolves, / save for a tatter of shimmering silk wrapped around my sagging shoulders.”
This book’s mix of personal text and well-chosen photos will make it a treasure for the author’s family.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5144-1561-0
Page Count: 38
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Following up his narrative of his rural Missouri childhood in Mid-Lands (1992), Davis (English/Univ. of Oklahoma) modestly offers a memoir of his middle-of-the-road, middlebrow, 1950s Kansas City college career. If a middle-class education (i.e., Ivy League) is ``supposed to help you maintain status so that your family can understand what you are saying,'' a lower-middle-class education is, according to Davis, ``supposed to help you improve your status so that your family will not understand what you are saying.'' Many of Davis's generation were the first in their families to leave home to attend college, and although this was not quite the case with Davis, he did arrive at the Jesuit-run Rockhurst College as a slightly bookish farmboy with an unexpungeable accent. Revisiting his college records and papers, Davis is abashed to discover a recruiting letter that boasted of a student body of ``average Joes scholastically'' and a prospectus that rhetorically asked, ``Does training by men and with men mean more to you?'' Davis finds his youthful self equally obtuse, not to mention naive politically, romantically, and intellectually. An undistinguished face in his class picture, his student-self is portrayed, with some lenience and affection, as semiconscious of the Korean War, oblivious to the Eisenhower recession, emotionally untutored with his first sweetheart, and in general too busy with intramural sports, the college paper, and ``barracks'' life to acquire a genuine education. While Davis writes with rueful clarity about life in a small midwestern college in the 1950s, he frequently strikes chords that transcend time and place. In contrast to recent let-it-all-hang-out autobiographies from academics, such as Frank Lentricchia's The Edge of Night (1994), Davis's personal memoir of the Silent Generation's college years stirs up nostalgia with low-key irony. (14 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8061-2848-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
An oral history of teens based on 60 interviews presenting a cross-section of the American cultural, economic, racial, and social spectrum. Oral historian Lewis (Hospital: An Oral History of Cook County Hospital, 1995) makes an admirable effort to present an all- encompassing portrait of contemporary teens, but an overly ambitious agenda results in an ultimately unsatisfying book. What's most interesting—despite the overall plodding tone of the monologues—is the disturbing image of America in the '90s that's projected here. Drugs are everywhere. Not just for ten-year-olds in inner-city projects, but even in integrated suburban public schools, ``drugs are just full frontal in your face every day.'' Violence is also common in the lives of too many teens. Thirteen- year-old Manhattanite Melissa Tates recalls looking out of her window and seeing ``this lady walking with her baby carriage, and the bullet went right by her head.'' Melissa's nights are often disturbed by the sound of gunshots. And despite growing up with the threat of AIDS, many of the young people here speak quite casually about sex. Seventeen-year-old Jian Berry talks about her friends who ``get caught up in the moment . . . don't use condoms . . . and it's incredibly scary.'' Touched by such parental problems as mental illness, divorce, and economic instability, Lewis's subjects—some already raising their own children—have much to contend with. Yet most of these teens display enough resilience to give pep talks to their faltering parents, to remind their mothers to take their medication, and to serve as role models for their younger siblings. Some alarming material, ill-digested. Despite arresting or moving moments, this oral history would have benefitted by having a sharper focus, with fewer subjects and less of the consequent repetition. ($35,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56584-282-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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