The humor of these poems is always harsh, mixed with a gallows reek, but it never detracts from the pleasures of reading....
Stephens’s debut volume is a spooky and sly collection of dramatic monologues and dialogues in blank verse. The poems are set in grim, rain-sodden spots all across the western US: roadside motels, cemeteries, and claustrophobic bars create the mood. Several of the poems are ghost stories, while others trade on the difficulty of telling the truly ghostly from the merely coincidental. In “Vineyard,” for example, three laborers sow vine cuttings and one is reminded of a grave he dug for his own baby; later on, he tells of an unearthed coffin whose occupant, “eyes wide as dollars,” had tried to claw his way out. In the closing lines he mistakes a live vine cutting for a dead one and the reader, with some discomfort, must re-evaluate the fate of the baby: “I know that line / Between the dead and living’s awful thin.” In poems such as this, Stephens’s writing is so fluid that one reads the piece several times, for the sheer pleasure of its voice, before attending to the hidden twists and ambiguities of the narrative. Stephens’s technique is clearly indebted to Frost, but he swerves from Frost’s woodsy subjects to a bleaker, more blue-collar world of “common grunts”—men who lose their days to meaningless, unremunerative labor: “[Ditch digging] isn’t science, and it isn’t art. / Quite senselessly, we pick the earth apart / And put it back, almost like before. / Nothing changes. Nothing.”
The humor of these poems is always harsh, mixed with a gallows reek, but it never detracts from the pleasures of reading. One of the more remarkable characteristics of the collection is its consistency: each poem deftly evokes a setting and summons a precise, individual voice. These are all unambiguously desolate spaces and desperate speakers, but their words are made luminous by Stephens’s careful and humane craft.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58567-014-6
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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