Reflecting on the craft of poetry, MacInnes writes, “when a poem appears to work, even in my intolerably rough and ready...
MacInnes, who presently makes her home in England, has also lived in Berlin and the US. In an autobiographical essay, “Why Poetry,” included here, she recounts some family history and her experiences of being a married woman, mother, and writer whose literary aspirations had for some time been subordinated to her duties to her family. Eventually she climbed “out of the bog” with a poem called “I Object, Said the Object” and got back to work. MacInnes’s writing is edgy, skillful, and often dazzling in its turns of thought and phrase. A fallow deer that looks “through the clear glass of the woods, as if all were illusion” is, like the person watching it, “a witness in opposition, / one who did not subscribe to the régime we’ve grown up in.” In “Hard Lives,” several roe deer leap in front of the car one foggy night and bound off like “bolt after bolt of silk tossed to the floor,” and not until days later does the significance of the scene hit home: that the deer had been “so famished / they’d fed with the farmer’s sheep, so vulnerable they fled / at the crunch of the car; and more, the world we despised / was open for them to take refuge in / as it wasn’t for us, who weren’t secretive, or starving.”
Reflecting on the craft of poetry, MacInnes writes, “when a poem appears to work, even in my intolerably rough and ready approximations, there’s a sublime moment in which all comes together and sheds light.” Many of these poems do just that.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-85224-474-7
Page Count: 78
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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