Given Dante’s own fascination with the relationship of poets to one another, this exuberantly showcases a vivacious dialogue...
A chorus of voices unites to sing the praises of l’altissimo poeta—Dante.
Hawkins and Jacoff present the homages of 28 poets, living and dead, to their great 14th-century Italian forebear. In an interesting editorial choice, the collection is divided between the odes of poets living and poets dead. The dead speak first, and their voices include such luminaries as Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and Howard Nemerov; the living, whose voices have been commissioned to speak, include Seamus Heaney, Charles Wright, W.S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren, Mary Baine Campbell, and Edward Hirsch. Given the multiplicity of poetic styles, periods, and themes that these poets address, reading their reactions to Dante provides revealing insights into a long and twisting poetic lineage that reaches from the medieval to the postmodern, as well as highlighting the ways in which Dante speaks to contemporary social issues. Auden, for example, ponders the meaning of Dante’s love for Beatrice in order to consider questions of human sexuality and the ephemeral beauty of Miss America. The consistent theme throughout is the intensely personal reaction that these 20th-century poets feel for Dante: T.S. Eliot’s introspective “What Dante Means to Me,” Daniel Halpern’s discovery of Dante in a youth hostel in France, and Jacqueline Osherow’s “She’s Come Undone: An American Jew Looks at Dante” all describe the ways in which Dante speaks to modern readers on an individual basis. The collection succeeds in capturing Dante’s genius by limning both the universality and the singularity of his appeal.
Given Dante’s own fascination with the relationship of poets to one another, this exuberantly showcases a vivacious dialogue between the living, the dead, and their Dante.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-23536-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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