A gently told memoir of an elusive poet and a mysterious friendship.
The tale of the author’s discovery of a compelling “minor poet” in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
In the early 1990s, novelist Towler (Writing/Southern New Hampshire Univ.; Island Light, 2010, etc.) moved to Portsmouth, where her husband had taken a position as a psychologist. At first, she was surprised to find herself in a place whose conservative politics felt alien to her and where unannounced visits by neighbors were a common occurrence. Having moved 20 times along the East Coast, with “a vaguely articulated notion that staying in one place too long” would undermine her ability to gather observations for her first novel, she worried about settling down. In Portsmouth, though, the author found inspiration for several novels and, now, a closely observed memoir of her ultimately inscrutable friendship with Robert Dunn, whose aspirations to be a “minor poet” were as intense as Towler’s desire to become a major novelist. “Minor poets have more fun,” Dunn declared. “There is no joy in the struggle for recognition, for money and fame and all they entail,” the author came to realize, “but there is a joy in the thing itself, the making of the poems.” Despite Dunn’s overt satisfaction with his life, Towler often imagined negativity for which there seemed to be no evidence. Celebrated as the poet laureate of Portsmouth, Dunn was pleased to offer readings and appear at events, a response that surprises Towler. She imagined that he found meetings of the Poet Laureate Program dull and tedious, when in fact, he seemed to enjoy them. She imagined that he was annoyed at her “frantic anxiety” over her “craving for recognition,” seeing in his eyes “a hint of accusation” that he did not articulate. As Dunn aged and was beset by illness, he came to rely on Towler for errands and support, a dependency that often puzzled her and is likely to puzzle readers.
A gently told memoir of an elusive poet and a mysterious friendship.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-712-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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