A monumental history of English-language poetry, told through the lives and works of its most important practitioners by the editor of PN Review, a director of Carcanet Press. Schmidt, not an academic but one of most significant publishers of verse in England, brings a fresh perspective to the history of English verse, and he casts his net refreshingly wide, including such outlanders as Derek Walcott and other Anglo-Caribbean writers, Irish and Australian poets, as well as early balladeers, among others (but without stooping to include rock songwriters and rappers). He also invokes the rocky history of poetry publishing and printing in telling ways, allowing readers to see the pivotal role played by the likes of William Caxton. From the book’s outset, he makes a case for the act of reading poetry, too: “I prefer to be unlicensed, to read a poem, not a text.” As a critic, he is incisive and deadly honest, describing early English writer Richard Rolle as “such a bad poet” and offering candid assessments of great unread classics like “The Bruce” or of perpetually controversial poets like Byron (“there is a tawdry excess in much of Byron, a satirist’s knack of simplifying for effect, but only sporadic satirical consistency”). Perhaps it’s to his advantage that he is not himself a poet. His language is fresh and relatively unfettered, his readings of the poets under consideration unhackneyed. Thus, Gower’s allegory is the “kind of poem [that] is insulated against real weather,” and Dunbar is “courtier and friar in one.” Still, this is not a book to be read from cover to cover in a sitting (or many sittings). The essays stand alone well enough to encourage readers to dip in at random, although Schmidt’s argument—for an inclusive and variegated “English” verse—is developed coherently and at length. Monumental, yes, but seldom dull.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40624-7
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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