Occasionally heavy-handed poems enlivened by evocative language and striking visual imagery.
A collection of meditative verses that views life in these United States through a long historical lens.
Ogilvie, a painter and the former poet laureate of West Tisbury, Massachusetts, arranges this collection of poems, art, and photography around themes in its opening work, “The Last Berth on the Mayflower,” about a Pilgrim woman’s hardships and hopes. Sometimes, as in “Thanks Taken,” she directly critiques the worldview of Colonial settlers as “God’s elect, self-chosen / to bring order into a ‘new world,’ /….a wilderness / hostile to your godly virtues of order and control.” But she also ranges far afield, taking on contemporary issues. “Wake Up Call,” for example, views a sudden storm as a “testament to how rough our times can be / and will be as we ignore suggestions to improve climate.” In “Until This Coronavirus,” the poet imagines humanity as a fragile collective, writing that “with covid 19 I see / A very endangered species—us….Like a herd of wildebeests I see us blind and / Running.” “I Can’t Breathe” voices outrage on behalf of “George Floyd who used a phony $20 bill,” “the black community with a knee on their neck,” and “the environment starved for years of oxygen.” Several poems take shots at President Donald Trump: “Sometimes It’s” likens him to Hitler, Stalin, and Bonaparte while “I Recall” avers that “tRump turned us into a Police state / now a triumvirate: US, Russia, China, / with North Korea and Israel on the side.” There are less overtly political poems, as well, including pastorales, reflections on loss and aging, and a quizzical ode to neutrinos. There are even whimsical jibes at British royalty: “If they would examine Harry’s DNA we would see / he doesn’t belong to them.”
The author writes in a wide range of poetic registers, from the gentle, homespun lyricism of “Domestic Me”—“Tonight I will gather all my kitchen brushes, and as it rises, will scrub the face of the moon”—to the apocalyptic foreboding of “The Next Time.” Paired with the poems are color reproductions of Ogilvie’s art, which provide a vibrant counterpoint to her verse. The paintings are divided between lush, sensual portraits and abstract works that tend toward rough-textured tiles of bold, solid colors or delicate, pastel tendrils. She also includes photographs of snow-covered beaches, livestock in fields, and vivid moons rising over placid seas. Ogilvie’s impulse to connect small, intimate scales to vast, geopolitical ones sometimes overreaches, as when the speaker kills a wasp in “Not Being Here Put On Hold”: “Now like DH Lawrence / and his snake, I will live in regret and guilt, but / would I do it again, go ask Assad and Putin.” She’s at her best, as in “Turkey,” when she’s raptly focused on telling details that bring the world around her to life: “On you come / proceeding with the delicate peck peck peck / of your deliberate scrawny neck sorting / among the seeds which yours, which not.”
Occasionally heavy-handed poems enlivened by evocative language and striking visual imagery.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-69-200952-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
