Yet, with ultimate tenderness, comes the taunting suggestion that we might have been better off in that jittery world poised...
National Book Award–winning poet Stern (Last Blue, 2000, etc.) brings the same renowned voice to prose, from a life that began in 1925 in what he recalls as the “Calvinist” Pittsburgh of his immigrant Russian parents.
“They were Sunday Jews,” he recalls, “nonobservant, indifferent to the mind, scoffers at culture. I was the first person to bring a book into the house.” And he read his way to the life of a poet—but hardly overnight. Using the memory he claims “my friends hated me for,” Stern plumbs the nonproductive decades of his youthful wanderings from Pittsburgh to Paris and through Europe to groves of academe for, no doubt, expiation. And while he always seems to remember whether he was reading Dickens or Milton when he was sleeping with a particular (often older) woman, he doesn’t always remember her name. His flowing style forms seemingly random narratives, but there’s also a cycle here: affirmation followed, inexorably, by self-deprecation and then the fears and doubts that lie in wait—for anyone—around the corner. Fortunately, the puckish Stern constantly spies on the impassioned Stern and informs on him. Considering, for example, a passage in Ezekiel, he notes: “It is a radical vision, and a little shocking, as well as being the kind of hyperbole that poets use to upset computer scientists and tree surgeons.” Holders of poetic license, of course, must always find the mystery in it. When there’s a lot of whiskey but no brute force, is it rape? Was the teenage Stern a feckless bystander or an accomplice? Were the nations of Europe in the postwar ’40s feckless bystanders or accomplices to the noble sufferings of sublime cellist Pablo Casals (a Stern hero) under Spain’s Franco?
Yet, with ultimate tenderness, comes the taunting suggestion that we might have been better off in that jittery world poised on the brink of a half-century’s Cold War.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05818-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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
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