His first two books recently reprinted by the Univ. of Illinois Press, the Idaho-based Wrigley, in his fifth, again proves why he earned the imprimatur of the late James Dickey. Wrigley’s harsh and raw verse exults in its masculinity, and in the toughness of nature: his wife, in one poem, smells the “testosterone” in the images of heavy equipment floating downriver after a flood. But this and other bouts of sappiness—especially in poems about his children’shouldn—t distract from Wrigley’s strength in poems that re-create in their sounds nature’s gutturals: his compound word-hoards rely on all the non-metrical devices (assonance, consonance, alliteration, internal rhymes) to capture the brutality on display all around him in the West. Many of these poems locate him in the wilderness, as vigilist, eulogist, and even savior. Both Whitman and the Bible lurk behind his long lines, and a number of his longer narratives are printed in italics, alerting us to the heightened language: in “The Afterlife,” he aspires to the stillness of the heron; in “Amazing Grace,” his admitted “yawp” sounds good, but meanders like Dickey at his incoherent worst; in “Meditation at Bedrock Canyon,” another self-conscious nod to Whitman, he celebrates “the forest medieval—; and the last one, “The Name,” witnesses the birth of his son, exhibiting the poet’s sensitivity. The most memorable sequence, though, is the title section, nine narratives with snakes in them, from a portrait of a religious snakehandler to the memory of a beautiful woman next door in his youth, who snapped a copperhead dead with one whip. The creepiest section puns on the title of the volume—a literal rain of snakes drops down on an earthmover that hits upon a den. Ophidiphobes beware: others will tire of Wrigley’s pantheistic excess, and his expansive need to embrace even bathos.
Pub Date: June 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-14-058919-8
Page Count: 982
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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