Heartening verse from Middle America.
Part meditation on nature and transience, part love letter to a Missouri home, Leaves is a strong contribution from a promising regional poet.
Heitsch infuses her verse with a clear and comforting sense of place, and her place of choice is her home in the Ozarks. So secure is the author in her hillside abode that she tears off in easy colloquials: “There’s a probe approaching Mars, but big deal. / We’re in the Ozarks, under the beaver moon / near full”–we’re sure there is nowhere else she’d rather be. Heitsch clearly pulls from the school of Frost and Whitman, but there is also a bit of the plains-inspired vastness of the Nebraskan and former poet laureate Ted Kooser. There is also plenty of the poet’s own definite sensibility, and we are as happy when she cleaves to her predecessors’ traditions as when she heads out on her own. Heitsch writes mostly in an easy free verse. Her lines are short, but never rushed or fragmented, and her language is casual and accessible without ever slipping into lazy slang. The images are by turns natural and domestic, and she has a real knack for infusing the mundane with inspiring new light. Of course, Heitsch is not a perfect poet, and she could be more careful with her words; her diction is sometimes strained, sometimes redundant. For example, how is it different to be “latently aware” than to be merely “aware,” as her speaker is in the less-than-elegant “Cheer”? And some of her experiments with rhyme seem juvenile, as in “Far on the Gravel”: “…the punkin’ on the step is ready excep’ / we’ll light it tonight when the time is right / to show the waif that here is safe.” But these are minor sins in a collection full of many small joys.
Heartening verse from Middle America.Pub Date: July 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4363-4113-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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