For a crowd that likes both Whitman and Spinoza and doesn’t mind some inconsistency.
A cerebral poetry collection of haiku and free verse, accompanied by a pair of essays.
Lenzi’s poetry is dense. The voice throughout the collection is professorial and frequently scientific. In “Lightspeed,” he tiptoes into special relativity, teasing readers with the theory’s complexities as well as a smidgen of scientific history: “Galileo opined…Isaac Newton refined…but Einstein defined…how time settles its groove.” “Rhomboid,” a melodramatic description of the four-sided geometric shape, sketches a halting, if not entirely convincing, metaphor likening the rhombus’s two sets of parallel sides to the two human halves of a couple in love. Elsewhere, in a haiku titled “Horizon,” five of the poem’s 17 syllables are used on the words “vectors” and “gradient.” These three poems all appear in the collection’s first five pages. Lenzi tends to overcomplicate his subjects, often using a flashy word when a simpler construction would do. For instance, “Lake Effects” begins in autumn with the “blithe susurration of leaves overhanging a lake” and, after referencing “realpolitik by the American right,” ends on a grating analysis of war in the summertime: “Summer should not hear the soldier in prayer / It’s too lovely and too warm to die.” But for patient readers perhaps willing to reread certain poems with a dictionary or almanac in hand, there’s usually a surprising insight or description on every page. “Lake Effects” cannily reminds readers that, as the seasons endlessly roll forward and repeat, time passes and significant events transpire. What most tempers the collection’s didactic bent and broad, encyclopedic subject matter—e.g., cosmology, time and wildlife—is the mixing of long, lyrical disquisitions (“New Hampshire Pastorals” is nearly 10 pages) with shorter, more intimate free verse, such as “5:00am,” in which first-person narration adds dashes of personality missing in many of the book’s lengthier poems. Similarly, the haikus are generally more accessible, occasionally even whimsical. Lenzi’s essays extend but don’t augment the concerns of his poetry.
For a crowd that likes both Whitman and Spinoza and doesn’t mind some inconsistency.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492879398
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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