Breslin’s (English/Northwestern; The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry Since the Fifties, not reviewed) first volume draws heavily from the postwar years, with uneven but generally stirring results. Several of the poems are dated from the 1960s and chronicle personal interactions with political movements, as in “White Wound / Black Scar,” about an ill-fated play depicting race relations. The poem ends in a kind of ars poetica, in which the play’s charged script becomes “bitter words that unsaid themselves / because we agreed to say them, and closed, / with its visible scar, an open wound.” The “visible scar” that language creates in its very ability to heal governs these poems, which can venture into painful territory without stripping away complexities or covering up paradoxes. The core is a series about the troubled life and eventual disappearance of the speaker’s father. These pieces have some of the vigor of late Robert Lowell, their confessional stance in dialogue with a wryly musical poetic line (“months of lassitude / punctured by fitful tennis”). Breslin also shares Lowell’s shortcoming that the more ambitious poems don’t always seem to add up to more than the sum of their parts, leaving images and ideas half-formed. Ultimately, the most satisfying works here are about other kinds of art. The short lyric on Webern and the prose poem about Corot offer the shock of recognition, of the interpenetration of one kind of art into another. Even the poems about personal experience give the sense of artistic compositions both beautiful and fleeting; “First Kiss,” for example, laments the loss of “the orange and red glow / of the Japanese lanterns, / broken in liquid arcs / on the nightlit pool.”

Overall, a satisfying debut.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-8101-5102-2

Page Count: 80

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE SHINING

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 1976

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A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).

The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....

Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976

ISBN: 0385121679

Page Count: 453

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
HOLLY
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.