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
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
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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").
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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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