by Paul Breslin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2000
Overall, a satisfying debut.
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
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by Nora Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 1995
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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