Idiosyncratic readings by a generous, gifted writer who asks his readers to be open to a story’s poetry, its “light by which...
The celebrated poet offers a personal reading of fairy tales.
Revisiting subjects previously explored in Iron John and The Maiden King, National Book Award winner Bly (Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected Poems, 1950-2013, 2013, etc.) wants to use his “intuition and write about stages of men’s growth as I see them in these tales.” For the author, these stories “are amazing trees of sound that grow inside the human memory and are fed by some longing for intimacy with others.” In them, the “psyche is trying to communicate what it knows, trying to slip something past the guards of the dictator ego.” Bly is influenced in his interpretive retellings by some “astonishing thinkers” (Kierkegaard, Yeats, etc.) and “those two old clowns, Freud and Jung.” The author first recounts each story in his own words and then informally discusses it (“let’s pause for some comments here….But back to the story again”) in the light of a variety of sources and poets. In addition to studying the works of others, Bly includes some of his own poems, a few previously unpublished. “One part of us is educated and one is not, particularly the feeling side, for men,” he writes. “I want to write poems for each side that both parts can understand.” The story of the “White Bear King Valemon,” for example, “offers us many glimpses into the divine world, which are difficult for those of us brought up in a culture that prefers not to talk seriously of spiritual excess.” Some readers may be bothered by Bly’s “intuitive,” philosophical ruminations on the stories, but he hopes that the “conscious mind may receive the fragrance of the old stories, tales told centuries ago by male and female geniuses.”
Idiosyncratic readings by a generous, gifted writer who asks his readers to be open to a story’s poetry, its “light by which we may see life.”Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-15819-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
IN THE NEWS
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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
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