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BLUE ASHES

Name: BLUE ASHES
Author: Jean-Paul Daoust
ISBN: 1-55071-093-1

SELECTED POEMS: 1982-1998

by Jean-Paul Daoust & translated by Daniel Sloate ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999

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Blue Ashes ($13.00 paperback original;Oct.; 144 pp.; 1-55071-093-1): The volume that won Daoust the 1990 Governor General’s Award for poetry. A French-Canadian by birth, Daoust sets much of his poetry in the gay demimonde of Greenwich Village. The most sensational aspect of the collection is the long title poem, a recollection of a love affair between a six-year-old boy and a pedophiliac. Told from the perspective of the boy (—He was in his twenties / Beautiful as a statue in a church / I was an angel in the creche / The one who nods his head at each offering / He loved me like no one else / Ever would love me—), it is rather more mawkish than salacious, heavily weighed down by a romantic nostalgia that is too immature to be daring. The same can be said of most of the other works here, which tend to wither prematurely on the fragile vine of urban insularity (—At the Dean and Deluca cafÇ on Prince Street / Convoluted arabesques of conversation / Abstract paintings always trying to trap / Something concrete but different from what’s been said / Words wilt like flowers—) or drown in the deluge of homoerotic prurience (—A naked black beside me with hair dyed blond / Is patting Shanghai / His cock like a beached blue whale / Between the World Trade Building of his thighs—).

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: 1-55071-093-1

Page Count: 144

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN

by Jacqueline Harpman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1997

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I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): 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'').

Pub 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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ORLANDA
by Jacqueline Harpman & translated by Ros Schwartz

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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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.