Quiet, beautiful poetry of bereavement.
A wrenching portrait of grief and soft comfort in words and images.
Poetry can exult. Poetry can analyze. Poetry can explore, and it can reflect. But poetry can also mourn. For de Wilde, it did just that, helping her to understand, cope and find solace after the loss of her husband of 50 years. The results of that process come to us now in this touching collection of free verse and photographic reflection composed in the days and months following his death. De Wilde met her partner Bob on a blind date coordinated by their mothers over a half-century ago. And though these seemed unpropitious circumstances for romance, love bloomed nonetheless. Walking out the door to meet the woman who would be his wife, Bob muttered to his mother, “Don’t you ever do this to me again!”—on which de Wilde coyly reflects, “And she didn’t … she didn’t have to.” Theirs was an enduring love, one that left a ragged hole in the author’s heart when it was gone. And she cannot deny the depths of her loss: “I was not ready for you to go,” she writes to her departed husband, “I brought you home to be with me. / I would care for you – / I could care for you / You were my whole life.” And many of the poems in this thin volume attest to the maddeningly stubborn persistence of grief. But slowly, gingerly, the collection also promises hard-won consolation that arrives, often, with divine aid: “Although now separated from you by such distance, such a long space, I am comforted, knowing that someday, when God finds me ready, / He will call me to join you.” Thus, de Wilde’s verse tracks the unhurried catharsis by which loss gives way to hope.
Quiet, beautiful poetry of bereavement.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452022314
Page Count: 72
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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