Startlingly touching poetry; be prepared to step inside the sorrow.
In 11 bare-bones, free verse poems, Rose (Heavy Bags of Soul, 2012) refines a yearslong grieving process into a heartbreakingly potent distillate of sorrow.
“I am at a loss,” declares Rose’s bereft narrator after her husband’s death. Ostensibly referring to her uncertainty about what to do with his belongings, the narrator is also confronting an existential fact; she has arrived at loss and seemingly has nowhere else to go. This technique—the evocation of loss on one level to imply an unspeakably more profound loss beneath—is one Rose frequently employs. She writes that “No one ever thinks of tragedy / the other way around / when nothing is left but shoes,” noticing that the “space between my fingers / is ever present. / At any moment, / small slivers,” and other fingers will never interlace with hers again. The sparseness of her verse—often a single beat or two per line—borders on gaunt and serves to codify the body’s and psyche’s inward collapses under the weight of grief, the instinctively protective drawing inward until “we are balled up in the fetal position.” She also structurally simulates the simultaneous, and paradoxical, scattering of self that accompanies a loss of this magnitude. Upon her husband’s death, she is at once “a wall” with “no door,” “the I’s that must witness” and the peripatetic who has “been bleeding out / all over the house. / I can walk / up and down the stairs / tens of times.” The difficulty of relationships—“So much compromise / when it comes to another”—urges her to acknowledge that “some part should feel like freedom / it should feel like freedom / it should,” yet what she finds is that his absence has become a violation of self: “Sorrow has left me naked / in a way I couldn’t have imagined, / leaving my life open to all. / Every nook and cranny.” The recovery of self, the poems reveal, is a long and always incomplete process. Though slightly marred by a handful of prosaic moments, the overall force of these poems is such that lines as simple as “I see a blue sky today. / It seems like a triumph” will, in context, shock readers with their cathartic power.
Startlingly touching poetry; be prepared to step inside the sorrow.Pub Date: March 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482791822
Page Count: 46
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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