James Dickey's reputation as a critic is based on plain speaking and the lauding of sound, humane, even homey values. His idea of the "suspect" in poetry is roughly equivalent to the notion that modern poetry has become "a complicated but learnable (for many have learned) game." "Most of our contemporary poets are writing into a Climate of poetic officialdom. . . based largely on the principles which the New Criticism has espoused. . . . We have lost all sense of personal intimacy between the poet and his reader." This sort of winsome polemic had some relevancy in the Fifties. Poetry today knows no such guidelines or iron-clad rules. Thus, both Dickey's theorizing or individual appraisals of a variety of different poets in this collection of reviews and essays covering the last ten years has about it the peculiar air of combat when the battle appears to be going on elsewhere. Dickey dislikes Ginsberg and Ashberry, as well as Robert Graves that is to say, he condemns both the confessional and experimental, along with the elegant, or what he would call the "autonomous," poem. His admirers praise him for earnestness, lucidity, and critical integrity, and it is true he does have these values. But he is also parochial, unsophisticated, and extremely limited in his literary responses, erudition, and prose style. The best pieces here are the tributes to Roethke, Aiken, Marianne Moore, and the solid analyses of five classics.
Pub Date: May 1, 1968
ISBN: 0912946865
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1968
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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