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
More about grief and tragedy than romance.
Five friends meet on their first day of kindergarten at the exclusive Atwood School and remain lifelong friends through tragedy and triumph.
When Gabby, Billy, Izzie, Andy and Sean meet in the toy kitchen of the kindergarten classroom on their first day of school, no one can know how strong the group’s friendship will remain. Despite their different personalities and interests, the five grow up together and become even closer as they come into their own talents and life paths. But tragedy will strike and strike again. Family troubles, abusive parents, drugs, alcohol, stress, grief and even random bad luck will put pressure on each of them individually and as a group. Known for her emotional romances, Steel makes a bit of a departure with this effort that follows a group of friends through young adulthood. But even as one tragedy after another befalls the friends, the impact of the events is blunted by a distant narrative style that lacks emotional intensity.
More about grief and tragedy than romance.Pub Date: July 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-34321-3
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
The sort of book that puts the shine back on genre as an adjective to describe fiction.
Spartan prose for a Spartan tale of badlands justice set in North Dakota and eastern Montana in the fall of 1951.
Watson’s writing (American Boy, 2011, etc.) is the principal pleasure here. The story is simple, ageless. Margaret Blackledge wants her grandson, Jimmy, back in Dalton, N.D. Daughter-in-law Lorna, her husband dead, has hooked up with the suave Donnie Weboy. Weboys are clannish, violent. Margaret appears prepared to undertake this adventure alone. Her husband, George, former sheriff, strong and silent, not quite the man he used to be, agrees to come. They set off in their old car, period details used sparingly, to wrest from a mother her child, to preserve a family broken by circumstance and hardship, to tempt fate. Grief has marked this fool’s errand from the outset—indelibly. To call the voice that narrates this novel omniscient is accurate only in so far as it describes the fictional convention. We hear an uninflected human voice that knows the outcome of this dark tale and tales like it. No one we meet, and no action taken, is beyond the expected conventions of a bleak American West: “[I]f I never hear again about what’s hard for a man, it’ll be too goddamn soon.”
The sort of book that puts the shine back on genre as an adjective to describe fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-57131-102-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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