A finely introspective work for lovers of nature and Thoreau.
Poetic personal essays and reflections on life, featuring nature as a teacher, theme and metaphor.
LaRizzio (Hey Milkman!, 2011) presents his personal observations on many of life’s key moments, using the idea of nature as a recurring theme. With the studied eye of a landscape painter, he offers deeply personal takes on the seasons, wildlife, modern-day living, sunrise and sunset, the sounds of nature, the art of writing, a place called Mt. Laurel, and the rain, snow and wind, among many other topics. He divides the work into several chapters by year of composition, beginning in 1994 and continuing through 2000, and further organizes the pieces by season and month. He includes black-and-white photographs throughout, giving a sense of both a journey and a journal. LaRizzio assumes the voices of such great transcendentalist writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and he proves to be an able naturalist and philosopher himself: “We are living life at an isolating distance,” he writes, contrasting the beauty of nature with the artificial lives of the modern era. Many first-person observations resonate: “I step outside into the brittleness of the evening air and absolve myself from the oppressive claim of the office. The darkness is pervasive, pouring its heavy chill into the empty spaces that dominate the winter-laden land”; “I’ve come to know the snow as crystallized silence.” Like a book of watercolor sketches, each essay displays LaRizzio’s maturing skills as a descriptive narrator. The occasional overuse of alliteration (“Man surrenders himself to prayer, practice, and preach; to sermon, solemnity, and psalm”) is easily forgiven as the author migrates to rhymed poetry and re-emphasizes his central theme: “I surrender myself to the ethereal breeze, the dawn’s subtle tease that romances the flowers and dances the leaves. I celebrate the liturgy of the morning damp.” In poetic fashion, the book highlights the religion of Mother Nature and prods modern-day unbelievers to examine their own creeds.
A finely introspective work for lovers of nature and Thoreau.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1457522703
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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