paper 1-889330-14-0 Chosen by Kimbrell’s former teacher, Charles Wright, for the Kathyrn A. Morton Prize, this fine debut volume also comes with a perfunctory preface by Wright, whose fulsome prose ill serves the modest achievement of Kimrell’s fluent verse. Often inspired by the landscape of the South, Kimbrell soon makes clear his preference for —the view above ourselves,— his desire to see from the perspective of the stars. —Mt. Pisgah— beautifully evokes a country scene of a —beam bridge/Above the snake-thick waters,— and —A Greeting— takes the poet back inside a southern mansion where, as a child, he joined a sÇance. At the same time, —Self-Portrait, Leakesville— suggests the need to leave behind his rural past, and a group of poems set in South Korea nicely answers that call. Other childhood episodes occasion charming poems: playing hooking to sit atop a horse in a barn; a night of wonderful passion with a —rebellious Pentecostal daughter;— and his lust as a teenaged stock clerk for a comely married customer. At the heart of the volume is the long title sequence about the poet’s father, a mentally disturbed bricklayer, whose stays in the asylum lead to lots of familial discord and eventual divorce, but most of all to utter helplessness on the poet’s part. Seeing him years later, with his voice box removed, Kimbrell dwells in the silences between them (—My Father at the North Street Boarding House—), the same silences that pervade a failed relationship (—Letters to a Vanishing FiancÇe—). Strong work by a poet of much promise.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-889330-13-2
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
None
In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur ("I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct").
None
NonePub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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