A thoughtful, honest take on the messy, complicated process of grieving.
A debut author offers meditations on coping with loss and learning to live again after the death of a loved one.
When Mertins’ husband died following a long illness, she wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming grief that followed. In the immediate aftermath, she had to “fight just to tread water and not drown.” Simply getting through the day was a challenge, as she vividly chronicles in this series of brief, journal-style entries on her feelings of loss, anger, depression, frustration, and, ultimately, joy in the years following her spouse’s death. The candid, contemplative book is divided into three lucid sections. The first focuses on “the terrible awful beginning,” or the first year or so after her loss, when grief was at its rawest and most potent. That’s followed by “the messy middle” and finally the livable “lasting non-ending”—the point when “finally…grief was no longer the place where I started and finished my day.” Mertins is hardly the first author to tackle the topic of losing a loved one, but what makes this work unusual and compelling is her adamant refusal to file the rough edges of her emotions in order to make readers more comfortable. Speaking to others who have experienced a similar loss, she clearly encourages them not to deny or hide their emotions simply because society has set an arbitrary time limit on sorrow. As one sympathetic person told her, “It’s grief and it will take as long as it will take.” Nor is the author a fan of the concept of moving on, a phrase that “suggests closing the door on what was.” Instead, she prefers to think of “moving forward,” which involves acknowledging “the love that carried me through those years and helped me become who I now am” while also accepting that it’s possible to build a new and meaningful life. This may not be the most elegantly written book on grief, but in sharing her unvarnished emotions, Mertins will surely provide some comfort to those facing a similar loss.
A thoughtful, honest take on the messy, complicated process of grieving.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-0854-7
Page Count: 150
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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