bookshelf

REIGN OF SNAKES

Name: REIGN OF SNAKES
Author: Robert Wrigley
ISBN: 0-14-058919-8

by Robert Wrigley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 1999

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

bookshelf

Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
OTHER WORLDS THAN THESE
by Stephen King & Peter Straub

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.