Shot through with personal and often underdeveloped pieces, this collection nevertheless has tender spirit to share.
A somewhat random collection of free verse and short prose reflections with a Midwestern flair.
“I am often visited in the middle of the night by a muse,” Pollock says. “When awakened by the muse, I rush down to my office. By the time I get there, I have a fully developed ‘piece.’…Most of the ‘pieces’ in this book materialized this way. I might wish to take credit, but mostly I’m just grateful.” This well-worn literary trope was most famously employed by Coleridge in “Kubla Khan,” though where Coleridge’s apocryphal origination story is, in fact, an extension of the creative act, Pollock’s seems to be genuine. While his work can be tender, thought-provoking, nostalgic and at times even startling, it is rarely finely crafted or polished. Amid the reflections on Midwestern childhoods, failed marriages, world travels and longitudinal studies of parent-child relationships, his very fallible narrators are mostly earnest and unruffled. They seek enlightenment through simplicity and the abnegation of attachment and expectation—“I care not what awaits. // I am open to be / catapulted by the crashing waves”—and are intoxicated by their own histories: “I still recall the joy I felt….Writing about this almost 60 years later / brings tears to my eyes.” These vacillating impulses manifest formally in the collection’s cycles of short, epigrammatic pieces—“I thought I had a problem. / I didn’t.”—and rambling, nostalgic poems such as “Rude Awakening,” “Mrs. Stokesbury and The Orange,” “Dad” (both versions) and “Mom.” The short prose piece “My Moment with a Tibetan Buddhist Monk,” exposes a narrator whose moment of egolessness ends up boosting his ego, and in “Acceptance,” another narrator’s appetites assert themselves in the midst of spiritual practice. Whatever transgressions and relapses the characters suffer, Pollock tells their stories with a wink and a smile. There are indeed some dark moments in this book—it opens with the death of an infant, after all—but the prevailing tone is one of humorous compassion and optimism.
Shot through with personal and often underdeveloped pieces, this collection nevertheless has tender spirit to share.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1452580524
Page Count: 136
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
In this highly learned yet accessible book, Robinson offers believers fresh insight into a well-studied text.
A deeply thoughtful exploration of the first book of the Bible.
In this illuminating work of biblical analysis, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Robinson, whose Gilead series contains a variety of Christian themes, takes readers on a dedicated layperson’s journey through the Book of Genesis. The author meanders delightfully through the text, ruminating on one tale after another while searching for themes and mining for universal truths. Robinson approaches Genesis with a reverence and level of faith uncommon to modern mainstream writers, yet she’s also equipped with the appropriate tools for cogent criticism. Throughout this luminous exegesis, which will appeal to all practicing Christians, the author discusses overarching themes in Genesis. First is the benevolence of God. Robinson points out that “to say that God is the good creator of a good creation” sets the God of Genesis in opposition to the gods of other ancient creation stories, who range from indifferent to evil. This goodness carries through the entirety of Genesis, demonstrated through grace. “Grace tempers judgment,” writes the author, noting that despite well-deserved instances of wrath or punishment, God relents time after time. Another overarching theme is the interplay between God’s providence and humanity’s independence. Across the Book of Genesis, otherwise ordinary people make decisions that will affect the future in significant ways, yet events are consistently steered by God’s omnipotence. For instance, Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers, and that action has reverberated throughout the history of all Jewish people. Robinson indirectly asks readers to consider where the line is between the actions of God and the actions of creation. “He chose to let us be,” she concludes, “to let time yield what it will—within the vast latitude granted by providence.”
In this highly learned yet accessible book, Robinson offers believers fresh insight into a well-studied text.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780374299408
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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