This is a collection easy to live without.
Mitchell (Rapture, 1992) has published in respected literary reviews in the US and has won awards for her writing, including
fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation. "Erotikon," she explains, is "a made-up word created by eliding erotic and ikon." The 23-page title poem, subtitled "a commentary on Amor and Psyche," is peppered with fleeting (and largely gratuitous) references to St. Augustine, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Milton, Catullus, Plato, and Apuleius—as if name-dropping would somehow justify the poem’s prosy meanderings through a quasi-classical world that never comes into focus. A passage detailing Mitchell’s fascination with "dictionaries of the erotic" contains the clunker, "Catullus could get away with a lot because he wrote in Latin"—a claim that, sadly enough, cannot be made for Mitchell. The opening lines of the book’s long first poem ("Bird: A Memoir") seem to indicate that what follows is a self-portrait, alter ego, or persona of the author: "If you go back far enough in my family tree there are birds. . . . / that move like shadows in the branches. How do I know this? / Is it something about the face that looks back at me / from mirrors? Something in the way I move? In my voice? / Yes, it’s true I can mimic their songs, but only / if I sip warm water first." The poem is strewn with archaic references (footnoted at the back) that never quite seem relevant, and many lines are crippled by tortured syntax: "Take, for example, the question of locus, blithe recitatives / of space where perch I." Come again? A bird perching on a blithe recitative of space?
This is a collection easy to live without.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-055353-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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
SEEN & HEARD
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