An often beautiful, if repetitive, chronicle of youthful romance.
A debut collection of poetically charged love letters, exchanged by the editor’s mother and her first husband in the mid-1960s.
After Greer Dewitt died of cancer in 2015 at the age of 71, her daughter, Gould, the editor of this volume, inherited a box of letters and journals. In it, there was correspondence, dated between 1965 and 1968, between Dewitt and Dennis King, a man whom she met in Sunday school when he was 19 and she was 21. Gould had already known about King—her mother had spoken of him after her divorce in 1987 from Gould’s father—but she wasn’t aware of the full story of their rhapsodic romance. The letters trace the evolution of their relationship; in the very beginning, Dewitt was infatuated with him, but King kept his distance and withheld full commitment. They weathered long periods of separation, while maintaining an apparently tempestuous one union. Still, Dewitt was crushed when King unilaterally decided to enlist in the Marines, as it would be likely that he would be sent to Vietnam. The two married in 1966, and shortly afterward, Dewitt became pregnant but miscarried. In 1967, King was indeed sent off to war, where he was killed by a sniper the following year, and in an epilogue, Gould describes how Dewitt managed to climb out of her despair and eventually marry the editor’s father in 1977. The letters cover a full emotional range of Dewitt and King’s consuming relationship, depicting distrust and loneliness as well as euphoria. King, in particular, writes in soaring language, eschewing emotional restraint: “How is your agony?” he writes in one 1966 letter. “Does the protracted pain instill upon your heart the chrysalis of frustration that it does on mine?” (In another, he refers to her as “Blossom of all my Aprils.”) Also, the epistles provide a window into how callow youth can quickly mature thanks to life’s obligations. For readers who have no personal connection to Dewitt or King, the collection will likely seem a bit long, however, especially as many letters repeat similar sentiments.
An often beautiful, if repetitive, chronicle of youthful romance.Pub Date: July 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-91991-0
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Belle Reve Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
