Christensen’s probing, questioning, hopeful voice was an important one and is missed, but we can still hear it in this...
Insights into a poet who was definitely not living in an ivory tower.
Danish author Christensen (Light, Grass, and Letter in April, 2011, etc.) was one of Scandinavia’s finest experimental poets. Thoughtful and ruminative, these essays, skillfully rendered by translator Nied, reveal what poetry meant to Christensen (1935-2009) and how she wrote it. She calls herself “an almost insanely enthusiastic ‘enthusiast of language.’ " Her concerns were many—nature, art, philosophy, freedom, equality, and politics, including Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig—and her artistic influences wide-ranging: Blake and Newton, Magritte, Elias Canetti, Chomsky, Maurice Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty, and Giordano Bruno. In the first essay, Christensen recalls having three “experiences” as a young girl, “still nearly indescribable.” Those “warm summer images” were her “first aesthetic experiences.” “Silk, the Universe, Language, the Heart” is her poetic discourse on another discourse, Lu Chi’s Wen Fu. The author explores how language is alive for her: “All nouns are very lonely,” adjectives, “helpless,” adverbs, “quite strong-willed,” verbs, “very agreeable,” and prepositions, “nearly invisible.” By writing poetry, Christensen believes, “we’re trying to produce something that we ourselves are already a product of.” She envisions the Big Bang as a “poem” we’re “in the middle of.” When she writes, she “sometimes pretend[s] it’s not me but language itself that’s writing.” As “human beings, we can’t avoid being part of the artistic process.” Christensen excitedly describes working on her poetry collection alphabet, which was a “great adventure.” Poetry, declares the author, is “not truth—it’s not even the dream of truth—poetry is passion—it’s a game, maybe a tragic game, the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.”
Christensen’s probing, questioning, hopeful voice was an important one and is missed, but we can still hear it in this provocative book.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2811-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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
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