An affecting recollection of a life rich in literature and love.
A poet reflects on her long marriage and struggle to define her own career.
In a graceful, engaging memoir, Schulman (English/Baruch Coll., CUNY; Without a Claim, 2013, etc.)—former poetry editor of the Nation, director of the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, and winner of the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry—writes candidly about her marriage to virologist Jerome Schulman, her literary aspirations, and her grief following her husband’s recent death. She takes her title from lines by Marianne Moore, describing marriage as “that strange paradise / unlike flesh, gold, or stately buildings / the choicest part of my life.” Schulman met Moore when she was 14, the beginning of a warm friendship. She edited an authorized edition of Moore’s poems and focused on her work in her doctoral dissertation. Many other poets, writers, and artists make appearances as Schulman recounts the trajectory of her career. These include novelist Richard Yates; poets W.S. Merwin, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott; critic Irving Howe; and many of the acclaimed writers—e.g., James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and Octavio Paz—Schulman invited to the 92nd Street Y. Much of the memoir focuses less on her marriage than her achievements in the literary world. Schulman married reluctantly, fearful of giving up her independence, but her husband never failed in encouraging her to write and submit her work for publication; she chafed, though, at being dependent on his income as she embarked on her career, and her resentment “seeped into our marriage like smoke.” With their discovery of Jerome’s infertility and their inability to talk frankly about adoption, the marriage foundered, leading to a 10-year separation. “My marriage,” she admits, “has been a feast of contradiction: radiance and dissatisfaction; intense loyalties and devastating treacheries; freedom and the sacrifice, albeit willing, of independence; excitement and a kind of pleasant boredom.” They reunited only to then face Jerome’s illness and a heart attack, followed by years of suffering and deterioration.
An affecting recollection of a life rich in literature and love.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-885983-52-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
