Faltering but earnest.
In Poetic Reflections, Girardi gives readers heartfelt–if sometimes simplistic–devotional poetry that expresses the joy of and consolation of Christianity.
Most poems in this sprawling, occasionally repetitive collection are inspired by the Girardi’s faith, and she frequently waxes long on God’s enduring love, Christ’s sacrifice and the solace of prayer. Many pieces express the pain of losing a loved one, and some are dedicated to grieving family members. Sadly, this is familiar territory for Girardi, and she writes with genuine feeling about the sting of loss–“No one knows the pain you feel. / Each new sunrise, loss still real.” However, this hurt is always compensated by the author’s faith that loved ones will be restored in heaven–a blessed hope if one believes the Christian message, though hollow if one does not. Late in the book, Girardi’s verse briefly and unexpectedly turns political, with commentary on current events. On the federal government’s rescue loans, the author writes, “Now the auto industry wants a bail out for them too. / ‘Of course, sure, why not, we’ll get money to you.’ ” Readers also learn she’s against illegal immigration and exporting jobs. These are defensible political positions, but it’s a little silly to truck out conservative talking points in rhyming couplets. The author, like many other amateur writers, composes verse under the faulty supposition that it must rhyme. For the most part, this habit is distracting but forgivable, though it sometimes grates on the ear. Take the tortured syntax of the opening lines of “Thank you, Dad”–“Thank you Dad, for: / Acceptance you always had of me. / Belief in all, you thought I could be.” In her next volume, Girardi would do well to focus on free verse.
Faltering but earnest.Pub Date: June 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-3531-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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