A well-chosen introduction to the artistic and spiritual forces that shaped a poet.
Warmth and passion infuse a collection of poetry and prose.
The national poet of Chuvashia, “a remote non-Russian republic nearly 500 miles to the east of Moscow,” Aygi (1934-2006) left the region to study at the Gorky Literary Institute and, encouraged by his mentor Boris Pasternak, began to write in Russian rather than his native Turkic. “Only writing in Russian will allow you to articulate fully everything that is happening within you,” Pasternak told him. That decision changed the course of Aygi’s career, making him accessible to a vastly larger—and international—readership. France, Aygi’s longtime translator and friend, has collected 23 brief memoirs, interviews, poems, and sketches to reveal the poet’s aesthetic inspirations and affinities. A helpful introduction contextualizes the pieces and identifies poets—e.g., Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh—likely to be unfamiliar to most readers. The volume opens with an homage to Pasternak, written after the writer’s death and more than three decades after his meeting with Aygi. The younger poet was awestruck by a man he worshipped as “the older Friend, the Teacher, the unparalleled Interlocutor.” They discussed creativity, craft, literature, and the nature of existence. Pasternak, Aygi said, was capable of being enchanted “by all kinds of things and at any moment: a falling leaf, a child he met when out walking.” The miracle of creation, he told Aygi, surrounds us: “When you read a text, you are communicating not with letters but with the spirit of the author.” Just as the writer Vladimir Mayakovsky had led him to Pasternak, through Pasternak, Aygi discovered Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kafka (a name “sacred to me”), and Max Jacob. Aygi pays homage to several of these writers and others, including the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer and French poet René Char. Among avant-garde artists whose work Aygi knew well, Kazimir Malevich receives great adoration.
A well-chosen introduction to the artistic and spiritual forces that shaped a poet.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2719-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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