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BLACKBIRD DUST

Name: BLACKBIRD DUST
Author: Jonathan Williams
ISBN: 1-885983-49-2

by Jonathan Williams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2000

Over 40 must-read vignettes from the one poet in America happy not to have won a MacArthur.

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It’s not unusual for creative gifts to come in bunches; there are numerous examples of great poets who were also talented painters, essayists, or musicians. But seldom does one find a poet who is also an accomplished fan, and that, in a nutshell, is Williams. The author of nearly 100 books and chapbooks, Williams is also known as the founding editor and publisher of the Jargon Society. In that capacity, he has spent over 30 years uncovering and publishing works as important and idiosyncratic as Mina Loy’s The Last Lunar Baedeker and Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking. Here’s largely the product of those adventures as poet and publisher, with the resulting assemblage of portraits and thoughts providing an intimate look at an impressive number of 20th-century writers, painters, and photographers. In terms of drawing a reader to a subject, no one dishes up prose better than Williams. Here’s an excerpt from a blurb for the illustrator Bill Anthony: “No doubt about it, Bill Anthony, like the one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest, is in a league by himself.” Though Williams almost makes a religion of irreverence, it is his incredible generosity of spirit and interest that rises from these pages. His portraits capture the essence of his subjects, sending readers scampering to the shelves to see for themselves the works he’s unearthed. While his constant cry is the typical poet’s lament—“Dear Sir, I, too, am sobered by the revelation . . . that the death of Mrs. Frederick Bowen in Bartholomew, Alabama, leaves only 83 poetry readers in the entire nation”—the humor present in every line of this collection should convert even the most virulent versophobe.

Over 40 must-read vignettes from the one poet in America happy not to have won a MacArthur.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000

ISBN: 1-885983-49-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Turtle Point

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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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.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- SEEN & HEARD
Salinger Focus of NYPL Exhibit

- SEEN & HEARD
NYC Mayoral Candidates Name Favorite Gotham Books

- APPRECIATIONS
Holden Caulfield: Forever Young

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.