A quiet yet powerful verse exploration of everyday wonders, the construction of meaning from experience and the power of...
A captivating collection of free verse investigating the marvels of the mundane.
With her title’s subtle, yet unmistakable, allusion to Yeats’ “foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” Stevens (Sirens’ Songs, 2010, etc.) boldly announces her intention. Like Yeats, Stevens casts a long look back over her poetic career and life and rediscovers that it is not the whole cloth, purchased by the virgin bolt, but rather the fragments, the discards, the well-worn hand-me-downs, out of which sumptuous new creations can be sewn. In “The Rag Lover,” she gathers together the remnants of long-loved clothing, weaving together “a capacious (and magical) mantle of motley” that announces her as the “artist of alteration,” “the impresario of invisible reweaving” and “the rag lover, prestidigitator, poet.” More often than showy display, though, Stevens focuses on the invisible stitching of life’s smallest moments, especially the rich internal life that fills the gaps—and makes all the meaning—between the observable, external moments. The narrator of “Waiting,” for instance, suffers innumerable “accidents and disasters” of the imagination while waiting for her family’s return for dinner, only to have them arrive at last, oblivious, “as if nothing could ever happen / to any one of us.” Stevens’ narrators grapple with the tension between starting anew and holding onto the past, and with abiding loneliness, but they also revel in the magic underlying the quotidian and look forward to embracing old age with grace and dignity. In the long final poem, “Messes,” Stevens pays tribute to Walt Whitman, cataloging the many chores and challenges of motherhood and mapping the terrain of domesticity in a multisensory journey that blurs past and present and ultimately demonstrates how identity is found in struggle and engagement. In a delightfully pure Whitman-esque moment of unashamed, fully embodied revelation, she sings: “Dust is the color of what you find between your toes, / in your navel, in your privates, under your nails. / You breathe it in, but / not all of it comes out your nose / when you pick or blow.” Mote by mote, she asserts, we and the world become one.
A quiet yet powerful verse exploration of everyday wonders, the construction of meaning from experience and the power of immanence.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1936343027
Page Count: 52
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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