As a result, there isn’t a single poem in the collection that works from start to finish. Instead, what we get is a sort of...
It is always surprising and frustrating when someone who turns out sprightly and polished prose publishes a book of verse that is something less. On the strength of her collection of essays (Stealing Glimpses, 1999), one would expect former Kirkus contributing editor McQuade to be a sensitive and deft poet. Regrettably, her first collection is murky and, if anything, over sensitive. Virtually all of the 42 poems here are reveries of nature, idealized in ways that contradict the collection’s title (which one must assume is meant ironically, although it is hard to tell from reading the poem that bears that name). This book is an example of the pathetic fallacy run riot, at its most hilariously excessive when McQuade suggests the breathless sexual awakening of a delphinium. The versifying is arch, clotted with alliteration for its own sake and riddled with quickly tiresome tricks of shifting parts of speech. There are scattered effective moments, usually when the mad flutterings of the imagery quiet down into a certain stately coherence, or when a rare flash of wit can be found. Occasionally, an image will burst out fresh (“a pelican sagging with spent flight”), but these are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, one feels that she has chosen her natural subjects for the mellifluousness of their names, rather than for any actual content.
As a result, there isn’t a single poem in the collection that works from start to finish. Instead, what we get is a sort of educated Hopkinsesque greeting card verse, humorless and a trifle fatuous.Pub Date: May 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-884800-27-0
Page Count: 71
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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