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THE POEMS OF HERMAN MELVILLE

Name: THE POEMS OF HERMAN MELVILLE
Author: Herman Melville
ISBN: 0-87338-660-4

by Herman Melville & edited by Douglas Robillard ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2000

A much-needed showcase for one of America's greatest and most neglected poets.

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Although Melville devoted the last three decades of his life to verse, his poetry has always taken a back seat to his formidable reputation as a novelist. His penchant for narrative verse set to fairly conservative meters makes his work seem at first glance less interesting than that of Dickinson and Whitman. However, close examination reveals an intensity and variety of thought and feeling that is rare in any period of American poetry. In fact, Melville can match Whitman's expansiveness, or Dickinson's syntactic hermeticism—as he does in the brief manifesto "Greek Architecture" ("Not magnitude, not lavishness / But Form—the Site; / Not innovating willfulness, / But reverence for the archetype"). While Northwestern has been planning a complete collection of Melville's verse for several years, the volume has yet to materialize; in the meantime, Robillard's generous selection comes closest to a definitive edition. Included are a long and helpful introduction; the complete poetic texts of Melville's three published books; 60 pages of selections from Melville's four-volume narrative poem, “Clarel”; and several important poems left in manuscript at the end of Melville's life. The edition is hardly a perfect one. Robillard's notes are brief and tend to summarize plot instead of identifying cruxes or aiding with obscure references. He inexplicably leaves out the prose elements of the first book, including Melville's own notes to the poems. The excerpts from “Clarel” include neither the introduction, with its Chaucerian intimacy, nor the powerful conclusion, though the last two stanzas are quoted in the notes. But a great strength of Robillard's collection is its emphasis on Melville's sometimes drastic manuscript changes, which gives the opportunity to watch the poems evolve in calculated and at times surprising ways.

A much-needed showcase for one of America's greatest and most neglected poets.

Pub Date: June 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-87338-660-4

Page Count: 416

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).