Poetry that’s strongest when describing everyday wonders.
This collection of short lyric poems faces in two different directions–God and galaxy, marching ponderously across the page and toward a celebration of the commonplace.
Gibbs is a New England poet, and his work is redolent of gloomy gray skies, malevolent crows and gulls, ominous autumns and harsh winters. That region’s acerbic wit is present too, particularly in certain poems’ final lines–often-rhyming couplets that pronounce upon the paradoxes of nature and vagaries of human nature. There are some striking ironies, some fresh images. “Empty Times” is particularly delightful, with its picture of a person and cat lazing in the morning sun “thinking of nothing, quite a bit of that.” One imagines the figure taking a break from some poetic or perhaps domestic task, dreaming of “deep cosmic space / where nothing is, and nothing needs replacing.” Another lovely work is “The Circle”–though the blanket of snow he depicts is not original, the poet takes the image into a new and pleasing dimension as the crusty snow “guards the tiny beasts that sleep below / in drowsy waiting, ‘til the sun shall beam / and heat the frozen world, and end the dream.” Many of the poems are structured as a Shakespearean sonnet, or a riff upon the sonnet, with three groups of four lines each and the rhyming couplet at the end. The rhyme scheme and rhythms are irregular, and Gibbs occasionally seems to strain to reach the rhyme. The alphabetical-by-title arrangement of the poems in the book appears at first a bit artless, but “What Do We Know?”–a dissertation on the sweetness of life in all its seasons–is a strong enough poem to make an impressive conclusion. The most moving and convincing poems are those with the sharpest focus–on human nature rather than Mother Nature–and on the life teeming close at hand, “the little things / from which true wonder springs,” rather than the cosmos.
Poetry that’s strongest when describing everyday wonders.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4363-9607-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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