A poet's sad and beautiful memoir about growing up in Idaho logging country, in the complicated bosom of a fundamentalist Christian family. We readers often approach poets' memoirs warily: There is only so far that lovely, delicately crafted reminiscenses of childhood can really take us. They deliver pleasure, easily, but rarely go beyond it to the kind of bold, perspective-wrenching joy that is the province of real literature. Barnes's book forces reconsideration of the form. More in the tradition of spiritual autobiography than literary memoir—with its trials in the wilderness, falls from grace, and conversions and reconversions to faith—Barnes's tale is in part that of an actual American wilderness, the logging camp where she began her life. Her parents' Christian rebirth came later and the scene reordered itself to include revival meetings, dowdy clothes, speaking in tongues, and mandated demure feminine behavior. At a revival meeting a preacher declared Barnes to be a healer, a girl with a gift. At 14, increasingly restive, she was labeled a juvenile delinquent and was sent as punishment to live with the loving, tranquil family of a former minister who, notwithstanding the girl's restored piety, soon chose to shun her as a satanic influence. Adolescence went on and on, with Barnes's very real religiosity becoming increasingly, unsurprisingly complex. In some ways Barnes was a regular American girl; in other ways, like Yeats's dancer indistinguishable from the dance, she herself is the complicated and continuing story of the American struggle with raw wilderness and with the dark night of the soul (her mother finds her as a teenager slumped against the side of her bed, having fallen asleep praying, and wakes her up to go to school). It could scarcely be more significant that the author still lives in Idaho, above the Clearwater River. This is also a book about humility, and how one is of one's origins, no matter how far a person has traveled in imagination, artistry, and insight.
Pub Date: May 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47820-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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