A challenging collection of mystical love poetry that will appeal most to poetic scholars.
Gray and Anvar translate 80 poems by the 14th-century Persian poet Háfiz.
These ghazals—examples of a style of lyric poem that originated in Arabic—are printed in Persian and English and explore themes of love and Sufi mysticism. Early on, the poet laments a separation from the divine and expresses a longing for spiritual union: “My heart is tired of the cloister and the hypocrite’s cloak. / Where is the monastery of the Magi? Where is pure wine?” Upon merging with the divine once again, the speaker finds fulfillment: “The friend is with me. Why would I look further? / Intimacy with that soul-companion is enough for me.” This devotion is shown to be profound and all-consuming: “A heart-wound from you is better than the salve of another. / Poison from you is better than the antidote of another.” The poet offers readers moments of wisdom about gratitude and living in the moment in lines such as “Now, while you can, revel under the dome of heaven.” At the end of the book, Hafiz addresses the “ignorant one,” promising that “If the light of the love for truth shines on your heart and soul, / by God, you will become lovelier than the sun in heaven.” Overall, these poems will resonate with anyone who’s experienced heartsickness or spiritual longing. Avid poetry readers will appreciate the craft of the complicated couplets and refrains of the ghazal form and the intricacy of the language. However, others may be frustrated by the lack of narrative structure and may get lost in lines such as “What link do righteousness and piety have to the rend’s way? / There is the sound of preaching, here is the melody of the rebab.” Also, some may find the poet’s disdainful tone off-putting at times: “O lord, put them on their old asses, the nouveaux-riches / who flaunt their mules and Turkish slaves.” Certain images, such as wine, become redundant, as do Háfiz’s self-referential lines.
A challenging collection of mystical love poetry that will appeal most to poetic scholars.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781958972359
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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