It is a trick akin to writing good natural history, and few poets since the ancients have done so well as Seidel does it...
The second volume in Seidel’s projected trilogy, very loosely modeled on the Divine Comedy but with the compass points grimly reversed: in this cosmos we are headed downwards and there is no Virgil to hold our hand. Seidel is more notorious for his morbid and occasionally prankish eroticism (“Her caterpillar with a groove / Waits for love / Between her legs. / The crease is dripping grease”), but his engagement with public history is equally important and is a running trope in all his poetry. (Here he gives us Joan of Arc, and the lines comment provocatively on the radical naïveté at the heart of any religious fanaticism: “She feels / Her own emptiness but oddly / It feels like love / When you have no insight at all / Except that you are good.”) The author’s more common strategy is to place his narrator at an eccentric remove from history, and his tone is often that of a dandy who finds himself in the midst of tragedy: “Gentle Balinese murdered gentle Balinese / And, in the usual pogrom, killed / The smart hard-working Chinese / Merchants to the poor, Jews in paradise.” There is no overarching thesis or dictum to this grandly titled collection, for life is neither evolving to a higher stage nor regressing to the crudely animal—as Seidel tells it, the world and its story have always been full of style and brutality. The trick is to catch them both at work, to treat the former without coyness and the latter without moralizing.
It is a trick akin to writing good natural history, and few poets since the ancients have done so well as Seidel does it here.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-18685-5
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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