The natural world and human nature unite in this essential collection.
Armitage’s body of poems draws from the earth, generations of family, and revery.
The speaker is one with the grasslands, the farmlands, and the ancient landscapes that provide the settings of many of the poems. The imagery of trees and stones and a relic four-wheel drive transport readers to distant, quiet places where there’s room to meander alongside the speaker, whose memory dates as far back as dancing in the womb (“Invitro Bandstand”). There is a timelessness to this collection; the way memories live in the present through artifacts has a special way of transcending linear narratives. “In Aunt Alice’s Root Cellar” shows the speaker, sorting through 60 years of stored bric-a-brac under an inherited farmhouse, observing “Out on these dry plains there was a vision of paradise. / Taking these steps one more time, in this scarab of self, / I realize death is making one light enough to leave.” In “A Butterfly Once Landed,” a mourning cloak butterfly and the speaker’s brother join forces in the Houston Botanical Gardens: “They had so much in common!/ Nymphalis antiope [sic] and multiple myeloma. / Both wore black wingtips. / Both were on oxygen.” Animals are revered, their histories considered as important as that of humans, in “Plainsong,” delivered from the perspective of an eagle: “You could read a long ancestral ecology from my nest, / reworked sometimes for over 100 years, / aerial dendrochronology…” The poem “Cecil” is dedicated to a beloved Zimbabwean lion killed by trophy hunters, his once-vibrant form reduced to humble remains. The speaker brings wonder and deliberation to the subjects of each piece. The formal elements of the work are masterful—the use of empty space on the page in some of the poems, caesura, and the occasional inclusion of Latin terminology and (potentially) unfamiliar names of plants are a few devices that punctuate the verses and compel a deliberate reading. The poet has a way of extracting beauty from the most ordinary images, providing a reminder that everything in this world has significance, everything is connected, and we are all parts of an intricate web of life and death.
The natural world and human nature unite in this essential collection.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781599241753
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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