This diligently researched and masterfully written exposition will appeal to Anglophiles and fans of literary biography.
A perceptive biography that traces an author’s trajectory from disillusioned prose scribe to acclaimed poet.
American readers may be forgiven for not knowing the work of Edward Thomas (1878–1917). While lauded as one of England’s best 20th-century poets, his work has been overshadowed in the United States by that of his fellow World War I–era bards Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Yet Thomas’s life was just as dramatic and his poetry equally haunting, especially considering that he only began composing poems in the last three years of his life. A man tormented by depression, ill-suited to his marriage, aloof toward his children, and disgusted by the hack work that he had to churn out in order to earn a living, Thomas underwent a radical transformation when he met Robert Frost in 1913. Frost had moved to England in hopes of finding the success that was still eluding him back home, and he quickly fell in with Thomas’ literary circle. The two men immediately hit it off, sharing a keen understanding of the importance of cadence and rhythm to creating the mood of a poem. With Frost’s encouragement, Thomas began drafting poems that reflected his keen appreciation of nature as well as his thoughts on romantic love, rural landscapes and, increasingly, the war. By the time of his death, he had left behind a significant oeuvre, but the only poems published in his lifetime were written under a pseudonym. Poet Hollis (Ground Water, 2004), who edited a volume of Thomas’ selected poetry, expertly recreates the upheaval of English society as it made the transition from genteel post-Victorianism to brash modernism. Thomas stood poised on the dividing line between W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot and justly remains a towering figure in English poetry.
This diligently researched and masterfully written exposition will appeal to Anglophiles and fans of literary biography.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-08907-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
