A welcome debut. We hope that the next sequence finds Powers on safer ground, exploring the possibilities of life away from...
Powers, author of the shattering war novel The Yellow Birds (2012), turns to poetry while concentrating on familiar themes of dislocation, fear and “unmoored memory.”
As with that novel, most of the poems in this slender collection occupy three spaces at once: Iraq, the home front and the liminal country between them. The longest and most striking piece likens the poem itself to an IED, “or improvised explosive device”; though it opens on a rather unpromising poetry-slam note (“If this poem had wires / coming out of it, / you would not read it”), Powers builds steadily on the extended metaphor of poem as bomb, the images growing steadily more gruesome (“if these words were your best / friend’s legs, / dangling”). As is true of so many of the best poems about war—think Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” or James Wright’s “Mad Fight Song for William S. Carpenter”—the tone is understated, the affect sometimes unnervingly flat; having seen what he has of combat, Powers can no longer be moved by ordinary emotions, and the language he uses at home is the language of battle: “I tell her I love her like not killing / or ten minutes of sleep / beneath the low rooftop wall / on which my rifle rests.” And just as it is well that, as Robert E. Lee said, war is so horrible lest we come to love it too much, it is good that most books of poems about war, such as this one, are so short, lest we be overwhelmed by the grim news they bring. Powers sometimes wrestles with form, the length of his lines threatening to leave him breathless, but his intent is clear: He has survived, and though he now “know[s] better than to hope,” he also knows that he has beaten the odds—and that he is not alone.
A welcome debut. We hope that the next sequence finds Powers on safer ground, exploring the possibilities of life away from the front.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-40108-1
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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