Menaghan's verse is quite wonderful when he does not stray too far from his roots. He should indeed have `beg[ged] for an...
Menaghan was born in New Jersey to Irish-American parents. He now spends summers in Ireland and lives the rest of the year in Venice, California. Among other awards, he has won an Academy of American Poets Prize. This is Menaghan's first published collection, and as such it marks an auspicious beginning. Menaghan's work is humorous, ironic, erotic, neurotic, and tender both by turns and often simultaneously. In one poem, called simply `Fire,` he describes the passion of two lovers in terms that are sensual and metaphysical in a manner reminiscent of John Donne. `We brand our flesh forever with each other's fingerprints.` Many of the verses in the first half of the collection dwell on relationships in which there is at least the hope of sexual fulfillment, as when a friend of the poet reveals she is considering becoming a nun. `I cup your marble hands in mine, and coax you into one more glass of wine.` Here Menaghan's voice rings clearly and truly. But about midway through the volume, he becomes conscious of what he's doing and his voice cracks. He tries to be hip and modern, composing a series of poems on jazz legends rather than to the people he knows, and loses much of the momentum generated by his earlier works.
Menaghan's verse is quite wonderful when he does not stray too far from his roots. He should indeed have `beg[ged] for an incomplete in Modernism.`Pub Date: April 21, 2000
ISBN: 1-897648-45-6
Page Count: 82
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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