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
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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