paper 0-87338-615-9 Marilyn Hacker picked this debut for the press’s Wick Award—a collection by a New York poet she admires for his supposedly transgressive focus on things —corporeal—and for his passionate discussion of his homosexuality and his lover’s demise by AIDS. With Tayson’s attention to the etiology of disease and his autobiographical sex tales, the volume adds up to yet one more memoir from the history of an epidemic. The poet’s apparent self-loathing and his survivor’s guilt seem conventions within the genre, which he seldom transcends in these clear but formally uninspired verses. The best rely on indirection and deviate from the straight-forward AIDS narrative: —Phone Sex— splices the recordings heard on a sex line with memories of an affair with a married man and proclaims the poet’s unabashed lust (—I love all men’s cocks—); —Love as an Argument in Time and Loss— imagines ancient Greek lovers; and the seven-part —Sacraments,— with its clever variation on Psalm 23, mixes Christian imagery with personal memory and eroticizes the poet’s boyhood Christ. Elsewhere, Tayson remembers fearing God’s wrath (—The Gift—) and experiencing separation from both God and family (—First Sex—), only to find spiritual ecstasy in sex (—The Ascension—), especially in anal penetration (—Sacred Anus—). The many poems about his now-dead lover and the course of his illness pose an obvious challenge: to say anything negative would seem misanthropic and incorrect.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87338-614-0
Page Count: 72
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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